Promethean Ideas

Mrs. Miner is having a Promethean Linky party on her blog so I thought I would join in the fun. I've had my board for a little over a year now. I got it at the end of the year 2 school years ago and am super excited to start a whole loop with it. I love my board. Like I might marry it if I thought I could. I use it for everything and when it's down I'm in big trouble. It got sick (that's how my kids put it) a couple of times last year and I was really annoyed. I start the day off using it to determine if my kids are here or not. Two years ago my kinders had a difficult time recognizing their names so I created a pocket chart where they had to just put their name on it when they got there, then I turned it into a graph where they started just sorting by boys and girls and then I moved into yes/no questions. In first grade, (I loop) the started the year out with a yes/no question on my board. I usually try to incorporate our theme for the week and the sight words we're working on in the question. This is part of our morning meeting routine. We go over the chart and analyze the graph. It turned out to be a great way to teach less than, greater than or equal to. So this year for kindergarten, we're starting the day off just putting our names under our favorite color. I'm sure the first few weeks, we'll have to do it together but my experience with the board has shown that they pick up the technology stuff sooooooo fast. They were deleting things when they messed up and choosing the undo button all the time. We have our morning message and calendar time also on the flip chart. My kindergarten one needs a little work still but I love doing it that way. I still have a calendar up that the kids can use as a reference. But using the board, I could create activities that fit what we needed to work on. In first grade, we practiced patterns, number patterns, had a number of the day where the students wrote addition and subtraction sentences to go with it, time, and so much more. I have no idea how to post these activities on my blog but if you are interested, I could email them to you. So just comment and leave me your email address. The possibilities are really endless with what you could do on the board.
We use the Treasures Reading Series which comes with a cd-rom that has all the paper resources and the teacher edition book on it. I have downloaded the teaching  chart and workbooks on to my laptop. Now I can just pull up the resources I need on my board and then use the desktop annotate function and be able to use all the promethean tools on the chart. I love this because all the students can see it and interact with the charts and it makes teaching how to do workbook pages and worksheets so much easier. We have adopted a new math series and I've heard that it was made for interactive white boards. So I'm super excited to be able to use it. I've also created a flip chart to go with each week of the first unit of our reading series. I haven't gone on because I wanted to try out how they were going to work before creating more. I used the different tools that are part of the program to embed the sound the letter says. I just recorded myself saying the sounds (I use the spaulding program which has motions to go with the sounds and teaches all the sounds a letter says at one time) and when you click on the picture clue you hear me.
I also plan on it being a literacy center this year. I'll probably just start out letting them play games and on starfall with it. Last year, they were good about taking turns and understanding that they could use the wand or the pen but not both. They also know if they argue about something then they will not get to use the material anymore so arguing usually only happens once.
I could talk about the board forever probably. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm actually pretty good on the board. So if you have any questions, I would be glad to try to help you with them. I love technology and finding ways to incorporate it in my class. I also just like to play around on it and try to figure out stuff. Hopefully, I gave you a few ideas and if you would like to see any of my flip charts I would be glad to attempt to email them to you.
Here's the link back to Mrs. Miner's blog for more great ideas.