Have you seen this video on 21st Century Education?

This is an awesome video from the New Brunswick Department of Education which our technology director showed to us at one of our committee meetings recently. It really hit home for me and makes me all the more excited to be one of the model technology classrooms for our district.

I'd love to know your thoughts after you view the video.

Packing and Pitching and Purging, Oh My!

Our school year has come to an end~ the kiddos have gone home, the college kids have started their cleaning and I am sitting amongst PILES of stuff as I am in the process of moving my classroom from one end of the building to the other. We're only 3 days into vacation and a small part of me is  feeling the anxiety of being ready for next year already- not because time is flying by, but rather because of the long list of things that is in front of me (moving rooms wasn't originally on that long list but has moved up to the #1 spot) Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining as it is going to make me go through (hopefully) all of my stuff and decide what I really don't use or want anymore. We have 2 new teachers joining our team so hopefully they will be able to benefit at the same time. I keep reminding myself to take it one day at a time... get everything moved to the new room and let it sit for a few weeks, then when my boys go to summer school for 2 weeks in July, hit it hard to unpack and organize it all in the new room.
On a more exciting and positive note, my iPads have arrived for my model classroom (yep, that's one of the things on my long list for this summer) and I was able to check one out to bring home and play with over the summer- another reason I want to get everything moved- so I have some iPad play time.
well, back to work.... I'm ironing my seat sacks which I brought home to wash for next year.  Cross one more little thing off my "To do" list.

Animal Research Project

I finally found the time to upload my pics and write this post!

I have start by saying thank you to Mrs. M from Mrs. M's Blog for helping me to put the final touches on this project. I had been pondering it for about a month when she blogged about her experience and even shared her organizer! It was just what I needed to put the finishing touches on what I had been mulling around in my head.

I used this project as a culminating activity to our end of the year Organisms unit. It was a perfect fit and really a perfect time of year to do it as well. We started by choosing which animal we wanted to research. I picked about 10 animals ahead of time based on the books I had in the classroom. I wanted each group to have several resources available to them at a variety of reading levels so that all children in my class could be successful. My topics included: ants, bees, grasshoppers, wolves, bears, butterflies, frogs, and spiders. 

Day 1 -I put out each stack of books in various locations in the room and had students travel to each stack. They spent about 5 minutes at each area exploring and perusing the books.

 

Day 2 -We finished our exploring and then I had each student write their top 3 choices on a post-it.  I then paired students together based on their choices. Most kiddos got their 1st or 2nd choice so it worked out really well. I also tried to put high and low readers together so they could support each other.

Day 3 -I went through the organizer with the kiddos and then began to model reading for information and how to use the organizer, you can find a copy of Mrs. M's organizer here, by starting my own research on monkeys. We discussed/reviewed various nonfiction conventions such as the table of contents page, labels, captions, and diagrams and how these would be helpful in their research.

Day 4 -I again modeled reading for information and how to go about marking information in their books with post-its and writing their facts on their organizers. Partners then began working on the first section of the organizer- What does it look like?



Day 5 and 6- Students continue to work together with their partners to read and locate information pertaining to their animal. I started each day with a mini lesson related to what I noticed the kiddos were struggling with.

Day 6- We got the netbooks out and did some internet research. I set up a sqworl site ahead of time with several sites that were kid appropriate. We mainly used National Geographic Kids which had fantastic information, videos, sound clips, and maps for all of the animals we were studying. The kids did a fantastic job reading, listening, and watching the info on the site. Besides hearing the sounds of frogs and wolves, and the on-topic conversations of partner groups, you could hear a pin drop. Everyone in the class was totally engrossed in what they were doing!

After digging in for a few minutes, partners were each given a slip of paper to record a fact or two from their internet research. I was amazed at the information they gathered and the connections they made. The group that was studying honeybees saw a map of where bees live and were able to figure out that bees live everywhere except where it is really cold.

Over the course of the next few days, students took all of their information and turned their facts into a nonfiction book on their animal. You can find a copy of the writing paper here, which I also got from Mrs. M. The chapter titles were simply the titles from our organizer. The facts were written in sentence format and they added illustrations to each page. The quality of their illustrations was phenomenal. I was amazed to see how they incorporated so many of the nonfiction conventions that we have discussed throughout the year including insets, labels, enlargements, captions, etc.



This student wanted to enlarge a tadpole so she drew a magnifiying glass
 and then drew one larger than the rest. Clever!!



This student used an inset as she wanted to be able

to show the butterfly's 6 legs but wasn't able

 to do that from the perspective of her original picture.

  

Our covers turned out awesome as well. My special education co-teacher had done a lesson revolving around colors and feelings and then did a very cool project involving shaving cream and paint with the kids. We then used these as the covers for our project by giving each child a 5x7 piece of paper to put their information on. They had to have a title, list the author and illustrator and design a cover illustration. They then glued their 5x7 piece on to their projects.



On the last day of school we invited one of the 2nd grade classes to come over and enjoy our research. My kiddos were so proud of themselves!!! It was an awesome moment to watch as they were the experts this time which made them feel so good!

Next year I'd like to use Glogster as part of this project as well as adding a table of contents page. This year we just ran out of time as we were still putting the final touches on our booklets on the last day of school. I am beyond amazed and impressed with what my class did considering this was a "let's see what they can do" project in addition to the fact that I had a very challenging class.... I will DEFINATELY be doing this project again next year. Hopefully we'll be able to start it a few weeks sooner so we aren't rushing at the end. I'd also like it to be a culminating project that we could possibly use for an author's tea and invite our parents in to enjoy our hard work.

Animal Research

I have been working with my class for the past 2 weeks on animal research as a culminating project to our Organisms unit. I am beyond thrilled with the results and how well my kiddos, ALL my kiddos did with this project which also included internet research. I will post more details and pics in the coming days. This was by far the best project we did all year!

Bubble Day!

Where does time go? I can't believe how busy I've been with end of the year assessing and projects. I swear, some days I don't know if I'm coming or going until I'm already gone. I'm sure most of us feel this way at the end of the year so I know I'm not alone.  I think though that I'm finally feeling like I'm on top of things with just a couple of assessements to finish up and my report cards are close to being done (seeing as they are due on Tuesday at 8am- I know there's a light at the end of the tunnel for that "to-do" item)

As I mentioned in a previous post, we are counting down to the end of the school year with the alphabet. A few weeks ago we celebrated B day which was bubble day. We read several fiction books about bubbles including: The Bubble Factory by Tomie dePaola and Bubble Bubble by Mercer Mayer. We also read a nonfiction big book  by Dwight Kuhn and Melvin Berger called Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere. We even went outside and blew bubbles.

The best part of the day though was writing time and the fantastic poems that my kiddos wrote. We discussed/reveiewed describing words, action words, and similes to complete the format for our poems. The similes on the fourth line are very clever and creative

Bubble Poems

The next day, we used the netbooks to publish our bubble poems in a different format. We started out the morning with a little mini lesson on the SMARTboard on how to maneuver around ABCya's Word Clouds site including how to change color, font and layout. Then we passed out the netbooks and learned how to log on (it's a different username and password than what we use in our computer lab, but the kids did fantastic!) I'll be glad next year when we all have our own usernames and passwords and it won't matter if we are in the lab or in our classroom on the netbooks!! We then used Google to search for the website, ABCya's Word Clouds rather than typing in the address.
We then typed our bubble poems into this site which gave our poems a whole new look and feel. Kiddos got to choose their own font, color scheme and layout for their poem. They all turned out absolutely wonderful and each and every one has its own unique look and feel. Check them out below!

Free digital slideshow customized with Smilebox

After we were all done, we displayed our original poems along with our colorful word cloud poems in the hallway for others to enjoy (see pic at top of post). The kids have really enjoyed seeing people stop by to read their pieces which has really given them a sense of pride and authorship (is that a word?... oh well...)


** We did run into one frustrating glitch that others have run into as well... when we printed our word clouds on the color printer the left and right margins of our images were cut off. The pdf's that I saved and put into the Smilebox below are fine but when even when printing from the pdf file the margins are cut off. I know this has happened to others as well... I plan to contact the webmaster to see if there are any suggestions as this is a fantastic and easy site for early primary kiddos to use.

Countdown to the end of the year

We are using the alphabet to countdown to the end of the year. Yesterday was A for Animal Day. Each of my students brought in a stuffed animal for the day. We read with our animals, measured our animals during math as a measurement review and wrote about our animals. The writing turned out awesome. I had the kids write a description of their animal. My mini lesson revolved around using size, color, texture, and similes to help make their descriptions more interesting. When we were done, we put all of  our critters in the middle of our circle and I read each of the kiddos descriptions. Using the clues, the class had to locate each animal. When we were all done students took a digital picture of their animal which we then printed off and put on our hall bulletin board along with our writing for others to try and guess. The kids had a blast, the writing was awesome, and we embedded a tad of technology usage as well.  Check out my classroom blog post for examples.