Crazy and fun week

This week was crazy! We had so much to do and I feel like we barely got any of it done! But, the things we did fostered a lot of creativity through working independently and cooperatively.

One thing we've been doing about once a week is Mystery Skyping. I have connected with tons of teachers through Twitter, my blog and Skype in the Classroom (I even created a lesson on there!). My kids decided at the beginning of the year they wanted to reach all 50 states and 1 country from every continent, best way to do that is make it into a game like Mystery Skype! My kids have to work together to figure out the answers based on the clues, it's amazing. Some of my lowest readers truly excel at Mystery Skype because it's not about how many words you can read or can you get a 100% on your test it's a logical thought-provoking session of building your conversation skills, connecting with other people, and working as a community. I am so glad Mrs. Hamman introduced me to doing them and literally pushed me into.

This week we Skyped with a 2nd grade class room in Vermont, my students sat together with their technology in hand and were all ready! They gave clues that they previously researched and voted on as a class and listened to clues from the 2nd graders. It was awesome. At the end, we were able to ask questions about Vermont and learn a little more about the area.

On Friday, we changed paces a bit and worked independently on a project. Mrs. Moore found a website called Solve it your Way where the founder puts out questions once a month and asks classes to solve it any way they want, blog about it and link it back to their website. Then, you can see all the different ways you can solve the same problem. This month the question is Who can jump the highest. We decided to do this as a grade level and we racked our brains about how to do this! Then we realized we should ask our students because they will probably have a much easier solution then we do, and the kids showed us up.

Based on a student in Mrs. Moore's classroom we had students measured up against the wall with their arm up, put a piece of tape and then had them jump as high as they could and mark the height with a sticker. We measured the distance from the sticker to the piece of tape to get their total inches jumped. After everyone's first turn students had to go back to their seats and think about the way they could improve their jump, they had to do this quietly so as not to give away their secret to their neighbor. Based on their improvements they had to predict what their next guess would be and share the prediction with their neighbors. Then we went out for a second jump, our highest jump was 11 inches! It was such a fun project and I can't wait until next months question!

Check out a slide show of all of our Mystery Skypes so far!