Hello!
Well I want to share a website that I have been using for three years and a half. It is called Prezi.
Prezi is a website that creates an interactive Power Point presentation. Are you familiar with Power Point? If you have ever sat through any workshop or teacher training you will have seen a power point.
A Power point is a program that allows you to sequence what you want to share with your audience. Most pages in power point can be composed of text, graphics, pictures, video, and you can also add music. Also it can be very simple! Just with text.
Power points offers a variety of cool designs for your pages, you can make it look like a notebook or chalkboard, it can be "theme" in a combination of artistic mixes.
When you present a Power Point you have a choice of the "transitions" in between the pages--all the cool effects that make the text appear or flip.
A Prezi is the next level of a Power Point. It takes a picture of a tree--for example, and it lets you place all the information in the parts of the tree: the roots, the trunk, the branches, and in any places your imagination allows it to be. Prezi lets you create the transition by zooming in, zooming out, do a 180 degree turn to the next location. You can create a Power Point and import it into Prezi and it would place it into whatever "theme picture" you choose.
I am a visual person and since I learned about Prezi, I have fallen in love with it. It allows you to be as creative or as a boring as you can possibly be with the effect of a 3-dimensional aspect to it. Take a look at my example! Use the link and you will see what I am talking about!
I use Prezi at school with my Bilingual Kindergarten and the students love it! Don't you?
Prezi.com allows teachers to have an account for free, so go ahead and give it a try, you will engage not only your colleagues, but your students will love it!
As I am getting ready for back to school, I always have to consider whether some of my incoming kindergarteners had preschool or now in California the Transitional kindergarten.
So I always have a differentiated version of some of my core activities for vocabulary and concept development.
So I want to share the Pre-School Book I have for the back to school. Here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Free-Back-to-School-Pre-K-Book-1366161
I combined this book with my kinder book, here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Free-Back-to-School-Booklet-Spanish-English-1347760 and I have extra pages. I have had on occasion or two when a students does not want to draw anything at all, or sketch. So I give the student a "My mom" page and I have success. The student does draw their mom. Moms are incredible!
Another concept I like to teach is the difference between what is an sketch and a drawing. I use this knowledge when we are doing Writers Workshop.
I am going to switch languages on you. Please use the translator in top of the page to pick your language of choice.
Ahhh! A veces, al final del día ya no puedo pensar mas en Ingles. Tengo que hablar en Español. Estaba diciendoles que les enseño a los estudiantes la diferencia de un croquis y un dibujo. Cuando empiezo el Taller de Escritores enfatizo que hagan un croquis. De esta manera, pueden pasar mas tiempo pensando lo que van a escribir, y mas que nada es el ahorro del tiempo. El Taller lo empiezo por 30 minutos y luego le voy añadiendo de 5 a 10 minutos mas, conforme van incrementando el vigor de la escritura.
Have you ever heard your students talk among themselves in recess and notice that they are not conjugating correctly in Spanish? I teach Kindergarten so it is easier to eavesdrop!
I have! So I tried the verbal correction, they did not understand what I meant, and they kept on saying it wrong.
My students were saying: "Vente! vamos a juegar!"
I told them: "Vamos a jugar"
My students looked at me, turn around and repeated it in the wrong again!
So I went to my planning board ( yes! I have this huge sketch book where I draw my lessons!) to see how I could efficiently teach them the correct way.
So I have been making little tiny books to teach them the high frequency words, vocabulary for art, vocabulary for math, vocabulary for science, music, social studies, physical education, and technology since I started teaching in Spanish and English (Thanks to my Master Teacher!) in 1996----OMG! Of course my graphics were not what they are then, they have gone through many revisions, so you have new clip art in my Chiquilibros; by the way I get the kids graphics from different Shops. I go to Educasong and Educaclips, also I shop at Whimsy Clips, and Whimsy Workshop Teaching at TpT.
I though they have already learn how to do the interactive little books by tracing the word, coloring the pictures, cutting them, and placing the pages in order, to be staple. Then we read, and re-read, and re-read until they know them by heart. I decided to just add the Spanish conjugations with the pronouns so they will learn them. Later on, we drop the pronouns because you do not need them. The verb has the tense, gender, and person who is doing the action, so pronouns are redundant.
Notice how the natives of Spanish talk, you will never hear them using pronouns!
It worked, so I did it in English and I use them for my ESL students (in my district we call them ELD students: English Language Development rather than English as a Second Language)
One of my little students called them "Libros Chiquitos", then we kept playing with the word "Chiquitos" and another student call it Chiquilibros. Ingenious! So everyone started calling it the Chiquilibros Activity, and it was born. So I tried to translate it, but Tiny books was not as close or as catchy, as the whole "Chiqui" culture at that point in my classroom, so I call it Chiqui-books and my students really like it.
Here is the Spanish Conjugation Chiqui*books that I have in my store. Check it out!
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Back-to-School-Spanish-and-English-ChiquiBooks-1347830
Welcome to my "Chiqui" Culture!
