Pinterest Tutorial Part 2

Welcome back!  Steps 1-5 can be found here.

Now that you know what Pinterest is, how to sign up/be invited, how to find and follow people, and how to make boards, it's time to start pinning!

An important thing to remember about Pinterest.  Anyone that follows you will see each of your pins as you pin them, and vice versa.  Anyone on Pinterest can see what you pin and your comments.  It's 100% open to anyone with an account.  Also, the point of pinning something is so you can go back to the link when you want to.  You can also just pin things you like and have no intention of ever purchasing/trying/doing :)

Step 6:

Pinning things from the internet using your "Pin It" button is the easiest thing in the world.  Let's pretend you're on Anthropologie's website looking at boots.  Not that I've ever done that all day...

I want to pin these boots because they are adorable.  See how my "Pin It" button is about to be clicked up the on the favorites bar?  Let's pin this baby!  When you click on your "Pin It" button, this screen will appear:

Pinterest finds all of the pictures on that particular page and separates them out.  Hold your mouse over the picture you want to pin, and a button will pop up:

Click on "Pin This" and you will see this screen:

I don't want to put this boot on my Apartment Necessities board!  Let's change the board it will be pinned to by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting my "Clothes and Accessories Wishlist" board.

Now, it's time to make a little comment and pin it on your board.  Pinterest forces you to comment.

Click the red "Pin It" button and you have put it on your board!

(Here's a Pinterest secret few have figured out.  You don't have to write a comment.  Just press the spacebar once and it will think you commented.) 

Step 7:

Re-pinning.  Holy crap, is it easy to re-pin things.  That's how I've found most of my cool teacher stuff.  Other teachers on Pinterest upload cool stuff they've done, I see it, and I re-pin it on to my own board.  The whole reason I started this blog is to upload stuff onto my Pinterest to share with others!  Then I realized how much like describing things...

Here's how you can find the Education category on Pinterest.  That means all of the things everyone has put on Pinterest that they categorized as educational.  Warning: It's not always educational.  The first screen cap I did had pin of a girl in a bikini from behind.  Random things get thrown in...

First, go to the bar at the top of your homepage and hold your mouse over, "Everything".  (When you log in, you only see the pins from people you follow, aka "Pinnners you follow".)

You can either select a category from the drop-down menu, OR you can just click "Everything" again.  If you click on just "Everything", you'll get what I believe is a real-time feed of everything that is being pinned on Pinterest at that moment.  You keep scrolling down to look at more, and it will alert you when more things have been Pinned.

Here's what "Everything" might look like:

Pins from strangers.  Food, children's hairstyles, clothes, a picture of a baby sleeping on books... Anyway, you can see a million things a minute.  But let's get back to our focus: teaching.  Anyone else have to refocus yourself as much as your refocus your sweet cherubs? 

Go to that drop-down menu I showed you before and click on "Education".  You might see something like this:

Or this:

Pretty cool, huh?  There is a decent amount of stuff for 4th grade, but there is a ton of stuff that helps the general education world and a LOT of stuff for K-2.   

So what do I do when I see something I like when I'm on Pinterest?

REPIN.  

When you hold your mouse over an image, you can repin it from there:  

See the rainbow colored graphing worksheet with the kid's hand holding a pen?  It's in the top right corner.

If you want to see a larger version of a pin, you can click on it:

And repin it from here!

Click on Repin and you'll add it exactly as you add a pin from another website.

Pretty soon, you'll have an education board (named anything you want!) that looks like this:

Or this:

I have seriously done so many of the things I have pinned.  If I want to go back and read directions or get more detail, I just click on the pin and it takes me back to the teaching blog, store, or other type of resource where it was found.

Anchor Charts

Chart paper.
Markers.
Stick figures.
Bubble letters.
Lamination.


Anchor charts.


Anyone else love to make these?  I could write a bunch of stuff about how they're not just pretty pictures but that's no fun.


Here are some of mine!

You better believe they remember the difference now!

Not nearly as cute as I like to make them, but it was helpful.

This goes with this:

It can get annoying when our darling chickadees keep asking WHY they have to learn something, but truthfully, they do deserve an explanation once in a while.  Maybe all the time :)  Plus, the first text we used for the unit that introduced character reactions provided the cherubs MANY opportunities to react.

Explaining theme to 9 year olds was challenging.  Do you like how while I was making this chart I realized they didn't know what inferencing was so I threw in the definition at the bottom?  I explained it later.  Also I thought it was "inferencing" not "inferring" so I get to re-teach that one!  Thanks, anonymous co-worker :)

Goodness gracious do they love my stick figures.

Summary, not summer-y.  No, really.  I had to clarify.

This should be far larger, but at least you get the idea.

It's kind of tough to describe culture.  This barely begins to cover it.  The best part of this lesson?  When we talked about the "tradition" part, I meekly started singing the opening song of Fiddler on the Roof and HALF OF THEM KNEW WHAT I WAS SINGING.  

"Traditionnnnnnnn! Tradition!"

Anyone?

Inferring

I had to look at a lot of resources to clearly explain inferring.  Inferring, metaphor, theme, and culture are all concepts I understand fully, but the difference between understanding a concept you learned in 10th grade and mastered into your early(ish) twenties and teaching it to a 9-year-old is quite significant.  Also it's inferring, not inferencing.  Just found that out.


The cherubs in my class are having some trouble going beyond the text to think about why a character "really" did something or more importantly, why the author used the words he/she did.  It's tricky.  I had to backtrack and explicitly teach them what it means to think beyond just the words on the page.  It was a very easy lesson!


I started off with a mini-lesson of INFERRING skills.  Then we read the short story The Little Hatchet about a little boy and the older man babysitting him.  It's almost 100% dialogue and 4th grade is lucky enough to have literacy aides, so she and I did it Reader's Theater style.  The chickadees cracked up.  They listen intently and laugh at even the tiniest jokes and make my life absolutely complete.


We paused here and there during the read-aloud and recorded inferences.  Then we did more of that after the lesson.  Here are the two anchor charts I used to teach INFERRING, which I left up and referred to during the lesson.  Ignore how it says "inferencing", please.

Try not to be jealous of that magnifying glass.  I'm not even a trained artist.

I know.

I leave this up all the time.  Clear and simple.

I recorded inferences on this graphic organizer on the whiteboard.  The first column was text evidence, the second was prior knowledge, and the third was the inference.  Next time, I might flip it since the kids usually said the inference part first and we had to unpack it together.  However, doing it in this order kept the little equation I made consistent.  I used the same color for each inference and its information.