Flex+Time+Ideas

Share ideas for ways you have been involved in flex time activities at your school. (Please sign your name so people can ask you for further details if they are interested.)

Promote your new non-fiction books--have your kids fill in 100s areas in each area of their bingo card. When you booktalk each one, they guess which Dewey number they would be found under and mark it on their card. (Heather) 
 * Dewey Bingo **
 * Fun with Flags (powerpoint with country's flags, they have to guess)
 * Craft foam stamps and make your own stationary
 * Maker your own Harry Potter scarves (I bought a few of those round hat looms that we would check out from the library, the kids supplied their own yarn...I would demo it for them)
 * NaNoWriMo
 * High tech reading (I showed them Overdrive, how to download magazines)
 * Make your own button (we had a little button maker)
 * Doctor Who Day: we did duct tape crafts--bowties and wallets--with British-themed tape, and made sonic screwdrivers (pretzel rods with frosting and blue sprinkles) (Heather)
 * Photo scavenger hunt (and we made it things they could do the in the library)
 * Holiday decorating: we let them help decorate our Christmas tree, draw on our windows with those Crayola window markers--then they feel some ownership)
 * Star Wars snowflakes (there are patterns online...so cool!)
 * Olympic trivia
 * iPad Games (Word Mess, Heads Up--super fun if you put it on the projector so others can watch, or find a game you can play together as a group like Kahoot)
 * Graphic Novel day--schedule during free Comic Book Day Saturday, have people share favorites
 * Reader's Theater--Scholastic magazine has some fun ones you can do for Halloween like Sleepy Hollow, Dorian Gray--you can find them online through Utah's Online Library
 * Beckoning of Lovely--look at Amy Kraus Rosenthal (author)--she has all sorts of fun videos, and we made a "lovely" bulletin board where the kids could add a postit with a good deed someone did for them that day.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Nice Notes--we made stationary (very simple) that students could write a "nice note" to someone in the school and we would deliver it for them. The theme was "You Matter" so that was written on the bottom of each one. We had a little mailbox they could drop them in. We quickly reviewed to make sure they were appropriate--I just wrote the student's name and A1 teacher on the outside (it was a fold and staple format). Then I'd just put them in the teacher's boxes to hand out.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Hour of Code--can't remember when this usually is, but they have awesome online games to help the students learn programming
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Viral Library Videos--great ones out there by Studio C (Library fines, Teddy's Story Joint), book dominos, etc.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">We also did Studio C bingo--talked about what a literary allusion was, and then we watched clips and they had to look for the allusions--Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Poem in Your Pocket: we did little origami books and had the students copy a favorite poem or two into it.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Upcycled journals

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Movies/Books we've read and compared: <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
 * City of Ember
 * Journey to the Center of the earth (I only read them a section when they find the center of the earth...it's pretty dry!)
 * Flipped
 * Spiderwick
 * Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
 * How to Train Your Dragon
 * Seuss (during Dr. Seuss week)
 * Winnie the Pooh (we read a few chapters and then watched the original...that one was really fun)
 * One and Only Ivan--we read the whole thing, then watched the video clip of Ivan from the documentary that tried to get him freed, and a Skype interview that Zoo Atlanta filmed with his keeper.