Brandi+Vaughn

= Childhood Education major at Clemson University. This am working with Mrs. Phillips' first grade students at A.J. Whittenberg Elementarchildren and can not wait to have a classroom of my own. I hope to work in a Greenville County school after graduation. When I have free time, I love spending time with my friends and family. I love going to the beach and the lake. I will read anything and everything = **__What the Teacher Wants:__** This is a blog written by a team of teachers. Rachelle is a first grade teacher and Natalie Kay teaches fifth grade. What the teacher wants has so many creative ideas that can be very useful in the classroom. Mondays are management mondays and the teachers provide great classroom management tips. What the Teacher Wants offers a ton of free printables for a huge array of themes and topics. This blog also highlights other blogs that are very helpful. There are giveaways on the blog as well.


 * __Musings of Me__**: Musings of Me is another great teacher blog. This blog is geared toward pre-k and kindergarten classrooms. Again, there are many free printables on the site. The blog owner gives away her mega units for a brief time before she adds them to her "teachers pay teachers" store. This is a great resource for our younger students.

__**The First Grade Parade:**__The First Grade is yet another teacher run blog. This blog provides a lot of tips and resources for first grade teachers. The first grade parade is similar to What the Teacher Wants. The blog connects to other blogs as well to give teachers even more quality resources.

From working on my PLN, I learnedthat there are so many resources for us teachers. We do not have to do everything on our own. I also learned that how powerful social media can be and how it can be utilized in the classroom. The social media feeds are a great way to synthesize many resources to one place. These tools can allow you to see all updates in one place and save time.

**Blabberize**
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Poem: "Snowball" from the book __Falling Up__ by Shel Silverstein. Image: http://www.ops.org/ELEMENTARY/WESTERNHILLSMAGNET/Portals/0/STAFF_FOLDERS/T_Buda_Tina/clipart-snowman.gif

The Blabberize site is a very straight-forward tool that could be easily implemented in the early childhood classroom to enrich English-Language Arts instruction. A Blabberize assignment could satisfy many of the guiding principles for our standards. Blabberize meets Guiding Principle Five by allowing children to use oral language to express themselves. The students have to record themselves speaking in order to give their character a voice. This tool also meets Guiding Principle 8. It is one type of media that the students could come in contact with. It is one more tool that the children will know how to use to get their ideas across. Depending on how Blabberize is used, it can meet all of the South Carolina English Language Arts standards for second grade. In our assignment, we were reading poetry. This would help meet standard 2-1: students will read and comprehend a variety of texts in print and nonprint form. The students could be given an assignment where they write their own material for the Blabberize. This would meet Standards 4 and 5. These standards cover writing for a variety of audiences and developing written communications. Finally, If students were given a writing assignment that required research and multiple sources, the class could meet Standards 2 and 6. These standards deal with using informational texts and using information from a variety of places. The students may increase their vocabulary through their research and writing which would cover Standard 3.