Holes

So, in reading most of the my reading class were doing awesome! They needed to be reminded of some tips and tricks but other then that they were great on it! I also want to remind you that we just got done reviewing for AIMs so they better have been fresh!

Math...I noticed a tad more holes in the fraction area. Now again, we just got done reviewing of AIMs so we went over place value, expanded notation, addition and subtraction strategies; everything we did at the beginning of the year. But, fractions...yea, they just were not as solid as I would have hoped that they would be on them! So we reviewed via Galileo BUT this awesome new math website helped do the review with me (for all topics). I found this website about three weeks ago, went to tell Shana who just so happened to find the same website from another blog and then we got an email that very day from Robyn sharing it out! That meant we had to try it! It's called Front Row. So once you go through the not so fun process of getting everyone signed into your class (via a class code they give you when you set up your account...oh and it's FREE) then they take a pretest. After that they pick one of the 5 common core topics: fractions, geometry, numbers in base 10, counting, cardinal and algebraic thinking and data and measurement. Normally I'd assign them something to allow me to do the next part.

So they are playing, earning coins, seeing the leader boards...whatever...my favorite part of the kid version is that when they get a question wrong they get to watch a video that explains how to do the question! OR under the announcement of  "Wrong" they write kids name in the class that mastered that standard that you could ask for help! What a genius concept!

Now, for the teacher side...oh the teacher side! The thing I've utilized the most is the differentiated worksheets. You can click on each main topic (fractions or geometry) and within that it will generate a worksheet for each student in the class and where they had the most problems in based on their accuracy in that topic. So, I have actually been giving homework for the past week. Everyday for computer center they play on an assigned topic, then when everyone is done with it I print out the worksheets and see where they have the most problems. The topics all start at kindergarten and then as you get the questions correct they build through the grade levels (except for fractions because that standard doesn't start until 3rd grade).

So I don't have any pictures BUT I hope you can tell I'm excited about this program and so are the kids!

Earth Day 2014

So, Earth Day is always such a fun day! Kids love doing research on the Earth, experiments on how to save it and projects galore! This year Shauna found a global project that included a pretty basic concept, planting seeds and learning about the plant life cycle. It is called the Full of Beans Global Project, there are 60 classes around the world participating and each one of them have their own Wiki site and planted their seeds/beans on the same day!

We decided to do Lima beans, take the easy route and have everyone put three beans in a moist paper towel and hang them on the window. To make it more of a project I decided to give every child a kid blog to record their data, they have to answer questions every few days based on their observations and I figure if I can connect them to the outside world they may make more in depth observations then just color and size. 

We are also doing line plots and graphs in math, so we will be collecting data on the growth of the beans to turn it into a line graph and extract data from the line graph about their success or failure of the bean. 

To include our reading group we had them read Wonderful World of Plants (shared via Google Apps to make as little copies as possible) and then they had to research the history of Earth Day and create a Haiku Deck of their research. 

I'm really excited to see how this project goes, we planted the left over seeds in the garden beds outside of our pod to extend the experiment to see if they grow faster/better in soil or a paper towel. 

measuring their beans before growth to get baseline data

 watching a stop motion video on the germination of a plant

Releasing the stress and engaging the mind

The afternoon of AIMs is always an interesting time. You plan all this time, review for weeks and then you're left with time in the afternoon...do you review more or distress?

In years past I have reviewed more, taken the time to really hammer everything in but this year we're going to relax, distress, and move on. We have three main things that we will be working on (Jackie will be the main teacher but we planned it out together)

1. Rocks and minerals: Jackie had started teaching rocks a few weeks ago based off of the Arizona State Science Standards and because of reviewing for AIMs we never got a chance to finish her unit, so we'll be working on that.

2. Mystery Class: This is a 10 week unit that we have falled behind on so we're going to use this time to pick back up where we left off. Just a tidbit of inforation on what it is for you...there are 10 mystery locations (we're only doing 3 of them) that we have to figure out their location based on their photo period data (amount of time the sun as been the sky) and data clues that they give us. We figured out one of the locations is in Asia and one of them is in Africa, the third one I haven't the foggiest of ideas

3. Picture It: this is a Project By Jen where 24 classes color one section of a painting (Starry Night by Van Gogh) mail their pieces to each other and then you put together your 24 puzzle pieces to make a global art piece. Jackie will be teaching a little background of Van Gogh to the kids and we will be getting our section out to the classes by Friday...fingers crossed!

Relationships

So,  i kinda failed this week at building deeper relationships with parents. i mean, i continued my relationships with parents, making phone calls, writing some positive notes and making sure that any problem behaviors are made aware of to the parents. i focused more on my student relationships this past week, i feel like i've been doing so much review, and motivational talk and Aims talk that i have had time to have fun with my students and ask them how they were doing.

We have been doing GoNoodle lately, an awesome website for brain breaks, which allows me 3 minutes every hour to get up, dance and be goofy with my students. it's been awesome to see who is transparent with their goofiness and also enlightening to see the kids that are looking at their friends instead of doing what they want to do. 

i also have meeting with small groups to review for Aims but i've taken the time while we go over answers and review any last minute concepts to listen to their stories, their concerns, their thoughts and worries. it has been fantastic to be honest with them about Aims, to hear how there weekends went and to laugh with them.

i know we were supposed to share how we built relationships with parents, but this week i felt like i needed to go deeper with my students, they deserve all of me and i can't do that if i don't know what makes them tick and laugh and worry!

Also, i apologize for no capital i's...my keyboard is malfunctioning :)

Author's Craft

So, we're in that time of year that review and review and review seem to be the focus of our plans. Review games, review tests, review homework and review group work. After a while, it seems meaningless, boring and I think less and less effective as we force it on our kids.

We decided to read a play last week instead! We still reviewed, we still did games, we still took tests but we broke it up with some plays. While reading the plays we dissected the story, the words and the illustrations. Both plays we read had some olde English words that we had to discuss, why did the author put them in there, why was she writing the story that way, what did they mean and translate into? We also picked apart scenes and how they related to stanzas and chapters.

Unfortunately, this didn't lend itself to have any artifacts, but our discussion was pretty involved and the kids loved acting out their parts. I didn't realize I had such a dramatic group until I gave them the chance to be someone else and read with expression!

Math Practices 2.0

A week after Spring Break! How is that possible! Well, everyone knows that it's crunch time after Spring Break...the countdown is on for the end of the year and the dreaded AIMs test. So I'm glad that the reflection this week was math practices, why you ask, simply because it's easy to go into review mode and AIMS AIMS AIMS! Then you realize that you burnt your kids out before they even had a chance to rock the test. This was a gentle reminder that I still need to make sure students are doing work, thinking for themselves, solving and creating!

My student teacher, Jackie Cross, has been stepping up to the plate when it comes to hands on and project based learning (we're still working on getting those projects out to the global community but baby steps, right, right?) So this week, as a review of perimeter she made nine groups of three students, gave them a paper with all different shapes on them that were all outlined with different colors. We went to different areas around the school  campus where students had to find whatever shape was colored yellow and then find the perimeter of the shape. They had to draw it on their paper, label the measurements and put the final perimeter. They had to attend to precision to make sure the perimeter was correct and to make sure their measurements of the shape were correct. This was an easy activity that allowed students to get back into the whole school thing after a week off and showed Jackie and I who needed to be retaught perimeter and who got it and was ready to move onto area.

I completely failed to take pictures of this activity! I was reteaching kids on the spot who needed help and refreshing others who needed it. Sorry!

DOK 3 throughout our ELA class

After reading and rereading what DOK 3 means I feel like I do a pretty good job at using it throughout the week without even thinking about it! Some weeks it will be one activity where we'll spend time answering a question and doing a Socratic seminar, sometimes it's a Mystery Skype where yes there is a right or wrong answer but kids have to figure out, starting from scratch, how to get to it, and finally projects where they are thinking and creating all week!

I do believe it has been a week where logical answers, comparing and investigating were apart of our daily conversations. One of the first things we started working on was opinion writing. We're taking part in a grade level project where kids are writing persuasive essays, we will put one grand essay onto DonorsChoose.org and hopefully be fully funded to decorate the library with magazines for all students to read! Students had to come up with one reason why we need magazines, then we wrote a persuasive paragraph together. Well, actually they wrote it alone and then we combined great sentences together to form a class paragraph. They really had to dig deep to use those good description words and think why people will care about buying little old us magazines!
Next up, they had to come up with their own ideas and complete the paragraph. They had to formulate arguments to give to people as to why they should help us. They had to connect what we have in the library to what we still need in the library and cite reasons why. I was blown away by how quickly kids got to work, they loved the idea of actually being able to put their writing out for the world to see and get something tangible from it!

In reading class we were talking about The Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. Since it was a logical link from our Civil Rights talk last week it was an easy transition. Scholastic offers a great site that gives questions and interactive maps for the kids to learn more about the Underground Railroad (since we focused primarily on Harriet Tubman and comparing different authors on the same subjects in small groups). Well, a lot of the questions on that assignment were bold and plain as day in the interactive website, kids were just looking for answers. But, many of them they had to draw conclusions based on previous knowledge of the Underground Railroad, the Civil War (which we talked about in November) and our biographies that we had been reading. Some kids found it very difficult because they are so used to the answer just being there, they just have to find it. But they were able to perceive through and figure out the meaning of the question based on what they learned from the articles.

Donors Choose essay

Website students used to find out extra information about The Underground Railroad