Timing with music

I've finally come to terms with the idea that I need help staying on top of time. I am a habitually late person in recovery, slowly learning how regular humans do things on time. Every year I learn a little more. This year, I made myself a budget of every minute of my school day, not that we are anywhere close to that schedule in these first weeks of school. The other day, I even bought a watch. My transformation is nothing short of amazing. Just ask anyone who ever expected me to be anywhere between 1998 and 2010.

So to help myself and my students to stay on schedule, I have gone crazy with timers. I have Kagan timers, which are perfect for timing turns, but then I have to have them open on my computer all the time, which I usually forget. I got a magnetic timer from Scholastic that looks great, but only works about 30 percent of the time. But what I really like is a way to keep time that also keeps my students quiet and gives them some indication of when time is almost up. So I've been timing them with songs.

The ones below I like because they are low-key enough to not be too distracting, but interesting enough to keep them listening. If you have others, please let me know. Ideally I would love it if GoNoodle had a category like this, but until then, you can just bookmark this page and I'll keep adding videos. I can't vouch for the video content on all of these, so I wouldn't display them for the students, just play them on your desktop.

Pentatonix - Daft Punk remix. Some familiar songs with a little twist. About 5 min.

Zero 7 - among my favorite bands of all time. Super chill music. The few I have hear don't have the soaring vocals of the ones featuring Sia, which you should check out on your time. ;) Both of these are about 5 min.

Regina Spektor - Eet. Something about this song always makes me focus. 4 min.

Groove Armada - Edge Hill. Very laid back and a nice long 7 minutes.

TpT Sale!

Today and tomorrow is the Back to School Sale at Teachers Pay Teachers. My store is pretty tiny; I have two freebies and two (inexpensive) paid products. But hey, a sale is a sale and those two products (the I Can Statements and the Five-Minute Jar) are both 20 percent off.

The Five Minute Jar is a set of little cards that you can pull out of a jar any time you have exactly five minutes to fill. This seems to happen to me all the time. Something will wrap up five minutes before we have to get ready to be somewhere else, which is too much time to just leave early, but not enough to get involved in anything else I have planned for the day.

On each card is a question for which all the students will have an answer. Some link back to what you might be teaching, others touch on social skills, and others are just for fun.  It's also editable so you can make it work for what you need. I usually take answers for as long as I can, then let everyone tell their partner when we run out of time, so they all have time to answer. And today and tomorrow, it's only 80 cents!

While you're shopping, you should check out this store, where I just got some awesome writing rubrics and higher-order thinking math activities that I hope to use for Daily 3 math in the math journals. She has amazing stuff!