Have you seen these awesome valentines on pinterest?  
 I took some of that pinterest inspiration and applied to a fifth grade lesson this past week.  

Are you student's bored with power points?
Do me a favor and go here and click through.

Prezi is  a relatively new presentation tool that I discovered when my husband was in grad school.  It takes your old power point presentations and dances circles around it.  Almost literally.  Click on the purple HERE button above and check it out.  I've registered for the free educators license that allows you to create, share, and store plenty of presentations for use in the classroom.  I've just started using prezi but I wanted to share one of my presentation below and how I used it with a first grade class that was starting a project about Africa.  I found prezi to be super helpful in grabbing their attention and holding it while we talked about where Africa was in reference to us in Riverside, Illinois.  It also provided great visual backgrounds for our discussion on celebrations (hence the random slide of a child dressed as batman, we talked about if people weren't familiar with Halloween and our American tradition of dressing up what they would think) the Dogon tribe in Mali, and other traditional African masks and the use of symmetry and neutral colors in the African art.  

Below is a simple lesson if you're interested.