First Week Back

August 31, 2013

Our first week back to school was great, but exhausting! The days flew by and it seemed like we were constantly on the go. As usual, we over planned, and did not get through our week's worth of lessons, but we're on the way to establishing routines and helping our students become aware of the behavior that is needed for them to become in charge of their own learning. Our students need to be able to make responsible decisions and to work together cooperatively. This takes time, but the old saying, "slow down to speed up" really is true in our classrooms. Even though it was slow, here are some of the activities students said were the highlights of the week.

To help our students get to know each other we did the Getting to Know You Necklace that we told you about this summer. It was a big hit! Thank you Sunny Days in Second Grade for this idea!

We told you we were planning on using the story Tikki Tikki Tembo retold by Arlene Mosel to learn more about why our students' names are special. As an extension of that activity, we found a math name activity that introduced the kids to the words range, mode, median, and mean. While this was a challenge, especially finding the mean, it really did hook in our highest math students. For privacy purposes, we cropped off the names of the students until we get permission to use their first names.

To introduce math, we started with the famous question, What is math? To make this a twenty-first century student lesson that would actively engage all of them, students used the iPads to take pictures of examples of math they found in our classrooms. Then, they recorded these examples in their notebooks.

Science is always a favorite in our classrooms. When presented with the question, 'What do scientists do?', students in both rooms mentioned making potions and mixing things together. Many expressed their hopes that we would do this, and that's exactly what we did. That's why the Cabbage Juice Experiment is the perfect start to learning the scientific method. We focused mainly on making observations and what that means.

One final highlight our students wanted us to share was our lesson on visualization using two poems by Jenny Whitehead. One is called The First Day of School and the other is called The 179th Day of School. We introduced the poems with the titles covered. We read the poem to the students and asked them to think about what the titles could be. We charted their responses, and then went back to slowly read the poem to find evidence that either supported their ideas or disproved them. Then, we introduced them to the strategy of visualization. The students each got a card to illustrate one line from the poem that they could imagine in their heads.

Have a great Labor Day weekend!
Kim and Anne

More Good Websites

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Well, it's the final weekend before our first day of school and believe us we have the jitters.  Every time we think we are close to being ready for day one, something new gets added to our "To Do" list.  We met our new second-graders yesterday.  They seemed as excited to start school as we are.

We did spend most of last week in our Technology class.  We were inspired to incorporate more technology into our everyday lessons.  Our favorite class was when our tech coach reviewed Keynote and Podcasts for us.  There were a few little things we learned to make our projects even better, such as how to make the words come in and out of each slide.  We could never figure that out.  We also learned that you can record your voice in a Keynote project.  If you want to learn more about these two programs here is Tony's weebly site.

Obviously, we still do not have any student work or lessons to include in our blog this week.  That will be next week.  However, we do have three great reading websites.  Two are helpful if you want lesson plan ideas that go with the Common Core.  We would use these ideas as a springboard for our own lesson planning. We also might use some of the short non-fiction texts with our students.  It is nice to have examples of lessons that correlate with the Common Core since it is so new to us and it is what we are so closely held accountable for.  The third website is truly exciting.  It is called Global Read Aloud.  Teachers and students from around the world read the same story or chapter book and then blog about it with each other.  Each grade level has their own unique book to read.  Our students will be participating in this Global Read Aloud. It will allow them a shared learning experience with students from around the world.  We see this as critical in educating the 21st Century student.

Achieve the Core

ReadWorks.org

Global Read Aloud

Hopefully you will find these websites as useful as we did.  

Until next week...

Kim and Anne

Technology and Multicultural Ideas

Saturday, August 17, 2013

It's getting closer to the start of school everyday!  We cannot believe it, but we are really excited.  We spent a big part of last week planning for our first week of school.  It seems like planning for the first week of school takes longer than planning for any other week of the year.  One of our focuses for week one is to make sure we incorporate technology into our day.  Anne found a great article that shares ideas for using The iPad as a Tool for Creation to Strengthen Learning.  This article gave us the idea of using the cameras on the iPads to take pictures of our first science experiment.  These pictures should help the students record the results and conclusion parts of their lab sheets.  We can't wait to share the pictures and experiment idea with you in two weeks.  In the meantime check out this article.

We started our Technology Boot Camp class with our fabulous technology coach Tony Melton.  Day one was learning all about how to create iMovies.  The best part of this was learning how to use iMovies during guided reading, math, and the content areas.  We have a diverse population of students at Madison School, and one of our goals for this year is to better incorporate the various cultures of our classroom into our lesson.  We want to celebrate our diversity!  Our first activity will be to have students share why and how their parents chose their name and why it is special.  This activity was inspired after reading the story Tikki Tikki Tembo retold by Arlene Mosel.  An extension of this activity will come after we read The Twin Club story.  The main characters are of hispanic descent, so we will ask the questions "Do you know your nationality?  Do you know where your ancestors came from?"  This will be their homework question.  They need to go home and find out the answers.  We will then use iMovie and the Watercolor Globe button to create a movie of their answers.  For more information on how to use iMovie check out Tony Melton's weebly site.

Have fun exploring these sites.  We can't wait to share more technology ideas with you next week.  We still have four more boot camp days with Tony!

Kim and Anne

The Most Inspiring Workshop Ever!!!

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Hi Everyone,
I'm the only one writing to you today because Anne is on vacation.  I'm sorry this post is so late, but I've been in my classroom finishing the set up.  As I said last week, it is so satisfying to watch each section of my classroom emerge into a colorful, exciting place to learn.  I enjoy setting it up even after 21 years of teaching.   I do want to thank the custodians for taking the time to install my bulletin board yesterday. They are swamped with trying to get everything finished before the kids come on the 23rd, but they knew how desperately I wanted that bulletin board up (plus I told them I would bring them a treat).  It's the yellow bulletin board and it makes my room look so much brighter!

On the first day of school I'm going to have the students do Amy Lemon's writing and craft called A Summer To Tweet About.  It is a free download from TeachersPayTeachers. Last year's writing turned out so well that I am going to do it again this year.  You might want to check it out.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this past week I attended the most inspiring, electrifying workshop on writing that I have ever been to in all my years of teaching.  I know those are strong adjectives, but I'm telling you it was amazing.  It was presented by Kristina Smekens, and if you ever get the chance to go to one of her workshops I would highly recommend it.  

On Wednesday, Kristina talked all about launching the writing workshop and teaching the Six Traits of Writing.  Now I have been involving my students in writing workshop for my entire teaching career, and I have implemented the Six Traits of Writing for at least six or seven years, but Kristina gave me tips and ideas that will have a huge impact on the writing success of my students.  She also helped us plan out our first twelve days of writing to launch the writing workshop. Thanks to the huge resource book we received there are enough writing mini lessons and ideas to last me all year.  

Kristina spoke about high quality ideas, lesson plans, and research that satisfied grades K-12! What an expert.  The audience was riveted.

Plans to launch the writing workshop and introducing the Six Traits of writing.

The next day she talked about incorporating different writing genres into the modes of writing (narrative, expository, persuasive).   She shared new mentor books to use when teaching different writing genres and modes to our students.  Kristina shared templates and samples of her long-range writing plans so we could write our own. We also learned how to create writing rubrics with our students and how to use those rubric to gather grades.  I just cannot believe how refreshed I feel.  I cannot wait to try these new activities and ideas with my students.  I know my explanation is not doing this workshop justice.  Check out her website to find some of her writing ideas in the Idea Library.  If you attend her workshops she will give you secret sites that are loaded with even more ideas, templates, icons, etc.  Needless to say, I have already asked my principal if I can attend the workshop on reading that she is presenting in October.  

Anne is not here to proof my writing, so please excuse any mistakes I missed when I proofed it.

Until next week...

Kim

Cool Website, Techy Icebreaker, Reaffirming Article

Saturday, August 3rd

Wow, it's already August!  We cannot believe the start of school is right around the corner.  We have spent the past week beginning to get our classrooms ready for the kids.  It is amazing to watch each section of the classroom get transformed into an inviting, exciting, learning area.  Don't get us wrong, it's also overwhelming in the process.  Below are pictures of Kim's completed math, science and social studies areas.  The reading and writing areas are still under major construction.  Those two areas of the classroom always take the longest to organize so she saves them until last :).

Looks strange without student work!

Their writing about what a scientist does will hang from the wire.

Kim may change the sign to say Where are you on the map?  She hasn't decided yet.

This takes days to set up!  Still thinking about what will go on the bulletin board.

Hopefully the custodians will hang Kim's new bulletin board soon.

We did find a fun website for students to visit.  It is filled with math, word, and reading activities for grades K-5. The website is called RoomRecess.  Check it out!

Thursday, August 1st, we were part of a K-2 assessment committee. With several kindergarten and first grade teachers from neighboring districts, we wrote assessments, rubrics, "I can" statements, and lesson activities that target the Common Core State Standard Text Types and Purposes.  At the second grade level, this standard involves writing an opinion and supporting it with evidence from a text, as well as proving the evidence supports the opinion. As we were discussing our very challenging assessment for our second graders, the administrator facilitating our group asked us how we were going to teach our students this skill.  We said, "Through a lot of modeling."  We worry about modeling too much because the the common core, and how we are evaluated, focuses on students being actively engaged for most of the lesson.  While we agree with this, we also truly believe we need to make our thinking transparent to our students.  We need to show them how to do the concepts we are trying to teach them.  So we were thrilled to come across this article yesterday.  It is titled "The Think-Aloud Strategy: An Oldie But Goodie" by Elena Aguilar.  As much as we both try to keep up with the research and implement new ideas and strategies into our classroom, it is nice to know our tried and true strategies still have an important place in our teaching.

We wrote last week that we were going to try a new "Getting To Know You" activity by having the kids make "Getting To Know You"  necklaces.  We are also going to try another new ice breaker.  We are going to have our students interview each other and have them make iMovies of the interviews to share with the class.  The idea came from an article titled, "10 Techy Icebreakers for the 21st Century Teacher".  We decided to use iMovie, but Animoto is fun.  Kim used it a little bit in her ESL Technology course last summer.

We hope these articles and the website are useful to you. Good luck transforming your classrooms into magical places for kids to learn. Have fun creating and finding lessons that will spark imagination and enthusiasm in your students, and take time to relax a little more...the first day of school is almost here!

Kim and Anne