Oct 29, 2014

Our Padlet - What's a good question?

The students were introduce to Mystery Bags today but before they could find out what was in the bag they had to think about a good quality question to ask. Here are the questions they came up with. I think some of them worked hard to think about questions that did not require a yes/no answer. Scroll along to see the rest of the document. 


Oct 17, 2014

The Best Part of Me

My class has spent the last 3 weeks working on this project about body image. If you've never read this story you are truly missing out. The photographer decided she wanted to document images of a child's best part of themselves.

I've had this book for a number of years and just never did anything with it until this year. The students were given the task to come up with their best body part and explain why it was the best. We looked at the photos and built criteria around what the photos needed to look like. They had to figure out how to make them black and white thought the photo app. After they were finished their writing they went to work editing and then practicing their reading aloud. 
Please remember this is the beginning of October when this has been recorded. As a teacher I was struggling with doing this project, not because of the task bug the time commitment and the time away from regular instruction and building routines. After listening to them read and seeing their writing on their blogs I think I have quite a bit of information to assess them on and help them improve upon. I am confident that an improvement will  be made by the end of the year with their reading and writing. But for now I think they did a terrific job for this time of the school year. I hope you enjoy. There are 4 short videos and one more to be made.
Videos
Part #1





 


There is one more to come, I just have to finish it up.

Perseverance

Sitting at Big Blue (my guided reading table) during art and I'm listening to some conversations going on and the topic of perseverance comes up. 
Student A: I was watching my grandpa help my uncle with our horses and he looked like he was having a hard time. I turned to my uncle and said, "It really looked like you were persevering" 
Me: Did your uncle look at you strangely because you used that word? 
Student: Oh yay! He thought it was strange that I knew what that word was. 
Me: Thinking to myself, I think it's great you know the word and you can identify when you see someone practicing it. Smile appearing on my face. 
Then everyone had a story about how their parents looked at them funny when they used the word. I started to question the discussion when Student B said his five year old sister used the word. Hmmm...might have to think about that one. 
The point being, you shouldn't shy away from teaching them important words because they can identify it and use it correctly in their everyday life. I think I'm going to persevere and continue to teach them some bigger words. 

Oct 2, 2014

Chromebooks

There were 18 very excited kids wanting to learn about Chromebooks. We were lucky to have Miss Walter come and help us with logging on and saving our class web page. 
Exciting times in 2B.