Author: mthorne0503

Cauliflower Pizza Crust

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Since I’ve gone vegan, and even more so now that I am a gluten free vegan, I’ve always been in search for a really good pizza recipe. I’ve heard of using cauliflower as a replacement for mashed potatoes, but never heard it used for making pizza crusts until a friend of mine sent me a picture of a pizza she made. Let me tell you, it look delicious and it was constantly on my mind all week.

So, I began searching for a vegan alternative to the cauliflower pizza crust on Pinterest and this was the recipe I decided to follow. Click Here for the recipe!

The process was fairly simple, but my only issue was getting the crust to be crispy without overcooking it. Regardless, I still could have ate the whole pizza!

While the crust was baking for 30 minutes, I started to cook my veggie choices in advance to soften them. My toppings included tomato paste, vegan mozzarella teese, broccoli, mushrooms, soy grilled chicken, tomato and spinach. Once the crust was done, the toppings were tossed on and then I allowed it to bake again for an additional 10 minutes.

I honestly can’t wait to make this pizza again! It must have been good because my vegan husband, who isn’t normally a pizza fan, demolished the last half of it tonight!

That’s Genius!

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Nearly every educator who loves teaching with technology has heard of the two famous words “Passion Time” or “Genius Hour” at some point trailing its way through Twitter.

A colleague of mine introduced me to the topic from a conference he attended. It automatically intrigued me and I couldn’t stop reading about it. I was referred to the website of Paul Solarz. If you haven’t had a chance to meet him or follow his blog/website or Twitter handle, I highly encourage you to do so! (He also has some great information on Mystery Skyping) Mr. Solarz’ Website

I had the privilege of being invited to observe Mr. Solarz’ students in action, thanks to a colleague of mine, and I am so happy I took him up on his offer. I was blown away by what I saw!

I think many times we get caught up in education with making sure we follow workshops or curriculums that we forget about the students, even though we are trying to help them. One of the great things about common core, is that you can still hit various informational reading/writing standards by allowing the students to explore their own interest.

Passion time is just that, a passion….I couldn’t have been more excited to introduce this to my students.

In our writing workshop, we are currently working on informational pieces. I thought this couldn’t have been a more perfect time to introduce the idea to them. What better way to strengthen their research writing, but by allowing them to research something they are truly passionate about. Eventually down the road, our passion time will turn into Genius Hour. Right now it works out perfectly because of our unit of study, but in the future students will have that “hour” of time dedicated to them a week where they can purely research the essential questions that intrigue their brain.

Mr. Solarz explains the process very clearly on his website above. I think the important thing is to modify the idea to however you can fit it into your plans and routine.

My first general steps….
1. Have the students brainstorm questions that they have about their interests. (I showed many examples of what Mr. Solarz’ students had completed over the year)
2. Narrow those questions down to their top 3. Conference with students to construct an essential question.
3. Since it was writers workshop, we began with an on demand writing piece. You could just dive into their prior knowledge with a chart.
*4. This is where we are right now…I wanted a platform where my students could share their ideas, almost like an electronic portfolio. So, after break, each student began constructing their own google site.

I’m excited to take you along on our journey as well! I look forward to hearing any advice or feedback that you may have from experience too.

A Healthier ME!

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While a goal of mine is definitely to begin blogging more and reaching the status of many other educators out there in our field.  I’m linking up with 4th Grade Frolics, a blog that I began following a few years back when I used to teach 4th grade.

4th Grade Frolics

I’ve always wanted to join a linky, so I guess this is now the perfect time to do it. 🙂 As educators, we always strive to do the best for our students and we work constantly to make sure that happens. However, often doing that we forget about taking care of the teacher.

2013 was a busy year for me. Not only did I change grade levels and get to spend two years in a row with my lovely students, but I accomplished a whole year of being vegan and completing 2, half marathons! That is something I never dreamed of doing. A large goal of mine is to run the Walt Disney World Marathon one day, but in order to do that I need to take care of me first.

My struggle with fatigue has been something that has increased over the years. Granted I have worked in two very active careers after college, but there is nothing medically that can be found as the cause. In order to take better care of myself, I’m testing out being gluten-free as well in 2014. There are many vegan blogs and articles in cyber world that link gluten and fatigue together, so hopefully this will give me the small boost that I need to keep active for my 27 children at school and my lovely 2 year old princess at home. If anything, it will definitely make me a healthier eater in the end.

Have a happy, healthy New Year!

Padlet

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I apologize for the incredibly late post. Between report cards and gearing up for winter break, I really do look up to those that can blog on a regular basis.

One website I have been meaning to write a review on is Padlet. I originally found this website while browsing an educational blog by, Mr. G. Online. After discovering an idea for the Think 3D app on the iPad, Mr. G. also was discussing his integration of Padlet as an ongoing management tool in the classroom. So….. I decided to check it out.

I have used Padlet twice in the class thus far, both for math instruction. It is a really cool website to host a math talk on, where it will allow everyone to contribute to a post at once. The nice thing about the discussion is that you can even post pictures.

If you go to Padlet and create an account, you can start your very own collection of walls. For this specific example, I assigned my students a “Volume at Home” activity. They had to find a prism at home that they could snap a picture of with their iPads. Then, they used Skitch to label the dimensions of the figure.

Once the students came prepared to school, we took our images and posted to Padlet for our math talk. Students then selected an image to calculate the volume of. This is a great, quick and fun way to incorporate math from home and have everyone contribute at once. Imagine using this for literally any discussion in your classroom. Your students won’t need an account to participate, just share the QR code, link or embed it into another website for them to see. Enjoy!

Gossiping About Books

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One challenge for myself, and I believe any teacher who is just beginning Reader’s Workshop in a 1:1 classroom, is learning how to integrate the technology into the new curriculum.

My students have been working extremely hard to identify character traits, sometimes to get ELL learners to describe a character can be quite the challenge. We did some fun activities last week where students pretended to be the main characters from our read aloud and then we stuck post-it notes to them to describe the character. This was by far more entertaining than sticking the post-its onto a wall or chart paper. ha ha

The students expanded on this trait activity by doing a comparison of themselves to a main character in their book. Students mapped out their traits with a web and then compiled their list into a wordle website so any traits that they had in common would eventually pop out larger than the other words. 
I have a habit of constantly changing my plans. I’ll be on my drive into school when all of a sudden, a new idea will hit me. In our first session, in the 2nd book of Lucy Calkins’ Reading Workshop, Lucy introduces her mini lesson with the conversations that are heard in the hallway and how students should talk about books just as they talk with their friends before or after school. So, we decided to turn “gossip” into a positive thing in 5th grade so we can “gossip” about our books as we construct our theories. I found a great FREE app in the App Store called Comic Maker. I had the students flag, or post-it, their gossip/reactions as they were reading and in turn the students are creating comics to illustrate their gossip. They were excited to begin and I look forward to reading them!