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My Boom Deck has too Many Cards
You can control how many cards your students see in a Boom deck. Teachers and students love Boom Cards on Boom Learning, but sometimes your Boom deck has too many cards. Sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. When you have a Boom deck with dozens of slides it can feel a little overwhelming to your students. You might just want to assign a few cards at a time. The good news is there is a feature on Boom Learning that allows you to “hide “cards. This feature gives you control over which cards your students can and cannot see. The first step is to go to your library and assign a deck to your class. Now click the blue action button. You’ll see a drop-down menu with the words “hide cards”. Click that item. Next, you will be taken to the deck. All you need to do is click “hide card’ on the cards you don’t want your students to see. Click the continue button until you have hidden all the cards you want. Now it’s time to check with the overview button. You can see all the cards...
read moreBoom Learning Membership Levels
Understanding the levels of membership on Boom Learning Teachers are loving using Boom Cards in their classrooms. But navigating through the membership levels can be confusing. In this post, I’ll break down each level and let you know what makes each level unique. Once you have all the information you can make a decision about which level of Boom Learning will work for you and your students. Can you use Boom Cards for free? Yes! You can absolutely use Boom Learning for free. With the free membership, you can use any deck you have purchased on Boom or on TPT. They will be in your library and they are yours forever. There are literally hundreds of free decks for you to use. Your students can receive many of the benefits of Boom without you spending a dime. Let’s review the different levels Starter Membership – Free The starter membership on Boom is free. You can open a classroom with 5 students at this level which makes it ideal for parents who homeschool. I recommend that if you are a teacher using the starter membership that you add your lowest students into your class. You will be able to receive...
read moreWhat is a Boom Card?
Have you heard the buzz about Boom Cards and Boom Learning? In the search to constantly improve their students’ success many teachers find themselves asking “What is a Boom Card?” Boom Cards are self-checking digital task cards. We’ve all used paper task cards in our word work, literacy, and math centers. Task cards that require our kindergarten students to show their learning with a clothespin or a paper clip. Well, Boom Cards are similar to old-fashioned task cards but just digitized. Boom Cards Increase Student Learning. Boom Cards offer unique scaffolding so that your students’ learning increases. Many Boom Cards provide sound files that provide various bonuses for teachers. Students can hear vocabulary for unknown words. Sound files provide extra support for special needs students by giving students the name of words and letters they are matching/building. In math centers, word problems are read to students so you can be assured that your students are being assed on math and not reading comprehension. Boom Cards are self-checking. Your students receive immediate feedback. Students can make real-time adjustments to their learning with the feedback they receive. You can feel confident that students who are working independently are...
read moreUsing Boom Cards to Create Math and Literacy Centers
Using Digital Centers in Kindergarten Using centers in kindergarten is a great way to give your students practice working on math and literacy goals. One of the biggest challenges to effectively student-run centers is that your students can be off task. You send them to a well-planned phonics center but they end up doing something completely different. My students have always loved center time. To be honest, so did I. I loved the hum of students talking with each other, the controlled movement within a busy class. A well-run centers-based classroom is a joy to behold. Any kindergarten teacher who can manage centers while making it look easy is working hard. It makes me think of a duck gliding on the water while paddling feverishly below. A controlled center time doesn’t just happen, it takes planning. Kindergarten classes should have a vast mix of centers. Students should have access to blocks, dramatic play, science, writing, books, math, word work the list goes on and on. It can be overwhelming for a teacher to create all these engaging centers while targeting academic standards. There is a solution to creating engaging skill-based centers. It’s a lot easier than you might think....
read moreBest Books to Teach Rhyming
How to teach rhyming to beginning readers. Knowing our students’ ability to rhyme is a powerful tool for teachers. Knowing about a child’s ability to rhyme or not, can give us a heads up to keep an eye on the student. However, of all the phonemic awareness skills the ability to rhyme is not as valuable an indicator as being able to isolate segment and blend phonemes so we need to assess all the phonemic awareness skills. Understanding our student’s ability to rhyme can help us identify students we may want to keep a close eye on. Grab a phonemic awareness checklist here When a kindergarten student shows an ability to rhyme it tells the teacher that the student is able to discern the difference among sounds. It is a pre-reader skill that helps our kindergarten and preschool students stay engaged. Rhyming is silly and young children enjoy the fun of rhyming. Rhyming helps beginning readers to notice the sounds in the word. The silly words draw their attention to the phoneme and not necessarily the meaning especially if we rhyme with nonsense words. Rhyming teaches about the structure of oral language. By exposing our kindergarten and preschool...
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