Spring Clean-Up Blog Hop!

Thanks for “hopping” by!  I don’t know about you, but I am tired of all the CD’s I’ve collected over the years sitting around my classroom!  It was a bit difficult to teach my Kinders how to use the CD’s in our Listening Center!  I had several CD’s that I wasn’t able to locate on-line anymore to get replacements for, so I decided to look for a way to transfer my CD collection to my computer and then on to several iPods…MUCH better!!  Its REALLY easy to make it happen and you can save your CD collection for when you accidentally erase these off your computer! 🙂

Each month when I add new books to my iPods, I take the previous month’s books off.  I do this for two reasons…one, so that I don’t have to keep an entire year’s worth of books in the bucket that the iPods and headphones stay in (there isn’t enough room) and two, so that it forces my kiddos to listen to and try out new stories.  I always read aloud at least 1/2 of the books I have on the iPod at any given time, just to build up their excitement…then I have 3-4 more “mystery” books included on the iPod that they don’t know about until they go to the Listening Station.

Now that I have the process down…it takes me about 10 minutes to transfer the new books on and take the old books off.  I have a folder in iTunes on my school computer for each month, so if I find I want to change the order of the books around, I can just drag the book to a new folder or I can add to them throughout the year!

I also have team mates who have always wanted to borrow my CD’s because we didn’t have enough copies, so now that I have these saved on my computer, they can have their kiddos listen using my CD’s!

Also, there are some books that there just aren’t CD’s for…so with the help of my 9 year old…we use Garage Band and a microphone to record our own books on CD!  Its really easy to drop in a background track and add some turn the page signals.  The kids get a BIG kick out of hearing my voice read to them!

Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway so that you can have a chance at winning a $50+ TPT gift card!!

Click the link below to enter!! 🙂

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Now its time for you to hop to the next stop…visit Brenda at Primary Inspired!!  Click on the picture below to go there!