This IPEVO* visualizer/document camera proved to be the unexpected key to my success.

I needed to find an alternate solution to the countless worksheets, printed articles, and practice tests I use. Unfortunately, we have zero technology available, so that wasn’t an answer. As an English teacher, it feels like I do nothing but generate paper. I want to intentionally cut down on using paper in my classroom. No more passive students! Target 2: reduce handouts Quite a few of my classes contain groups of middle achievers, who have a tendency to sit in lessons not doing too much. It turns out that my visualizer was the key to meeting both targets. This year, I was thinking about how I could achieve 2 of my personal classroom targets. Mostly to show the class something that I couldn’t copy. I have had a visualizer (document camera) in my classroom for a few years. How a document camera transformed my ELA lessons It’s just enough to keep me going in cups of tea. It does mean that I get paid a small commission if you buy these items using my link. This doesn’t mean you pay any more or any less for the items shown. So if you see them in the shops this Spring, I would highly recommend picking while they are there! If you would prefer buying them online, then you can find them here: Students have to work out the meaning of the new vocabulary from the context of the sentence.Īs you can see there are loads of different ways that you can use these plastic eggs in your classroom, just to add a little bit of fun and variety to your learning. The new vocabulary word could be in capital letters. Introduce new vocabulary by placing sentences on slips into the eggs. They can then return them and choose more. I have these in a huge bowl at the front and I ask the class to take 3 – 4, then they write these down as their success criteria. Another might state ‘a character with a sinister motivation’. I might also include instructions like ‘an 8-word sentence showing emotion’. For example, one might say ‘simile’, another ‘metaphor’, another ‘personification’. I might choose to be a little more structured and include specific elements I want to see in writing. Writing eggsįor a writing task, you could place new vocabulary, writing techniques, different sentence structures into the eggs and students to self-select to create a success criteria or rubric for their own writing. If you are teaching a text, then you could place quotations or textual references in different eggs for students to analyse. Or you could challenge your class by telling them there are 10 pieces of new information, they have to find them all and then get them into the correct order. One strategy would be to number the slips and have students make sure they’ve gathered all of them. You can’t fit big pieces of paper in these eggs so you have to be concise.

So I would create 10 slips of paper with our new learning on. Then get students to do an egg hunt to gather all the new information. New learning eggsīreak up your new learning/information and place it into several eggs. Challenge and reward eggsįill some eggs with rewards and some eggs with challenges to generate a little bit of engagement in your activities. This is a great way to review material in a low stakes test. You can create enough so that everyone has a different question or you can double up and have two sets circulating at once. All you need to do is to make a list of quiz questions on one page.

Pass them around and get students to answer different questions from different eggs. Place a different quiz question in each egg. Ways to use your eggs in the classroom! 1. So as you can imagine, I have a whole load of them. In my local store, you can buy a set of 12 plastic eggs like this for £1. These little plastic eggs are a fabulous and cheap addition to your teacher-toolkit! They are great because the eggs come in 2 halves so you can put stuff inside. It’s about this time of year that supermarkets and pound (dollar) stores fill up with Easter goods. I love this questioning and review activity, is it perfect for the Spring and Easter season to bring a little fun to my classroom.

The eggscellent challenge clips