So we’ve been having these great workshops on how best to differentiate in our classrooms, spurred mostly by the administration’s focus on classroom teachers working with small groups throughout the day rather than teaching to the “whole”. Although this comes naturally to K-3 teachers, for those of us teaching 4th and up that’s not necessarily the case, even though it makes so much sense!

Well, one of our last presenters shared the wonderful strategy of using a tic-tac-toe board with choices of assignments to meet certain academic goals. Yes, this strategy has been around for years and years, and I had used it eons ago, but just like going to the grocery store, you get into ruts in teaching and find yourself doing the same old things – often forgetting other great tools!

Given our 1:1 situation, I decided to create a tic-tac-toe for our spelling program to include technology activities. You can check it out on our Cove Spelling Page HERE. This week was our first stab at it. The kids were so involved! Most of the skills were fairly new, including the part about uploading most of their artifacts the spelling page of their wiki (you can check it out HERE). So it took a little longer to get things done than it will once they get used to the actual technology skills. I had some quick learners who became my experts for others, which was wonderful!

Now, I know there are pros and cons to sharing grades publicly, but I decided to grade their components right on the wiki so they could have immediate feedback. They loved being able to open their page and see their grades. And since we’re using the wiki as a digital portfolio, their parents can see the grades right away as well.

Well, today was the big end of week test. Just so you know, last week my class scored an average of a 79.8 on the 20 word test. Nothing to phone home about! I don’t think many of them glanced at their lists or the “old” practice activities more than the 5 minutes it took them to mindlessly get them done. This week was different! They were engaged with their spelling words every day. The difference shows up in the scores! Our average for this week? Are you sitting down? A whopping 93.9! Eleven of my 19 kids scored a 100 on the test. Proud? Yes, I was proud, but they were even more proud! Proud that they learned some new technology skills, proud that they completed some more interesting tasks, and proud that they knew the words (easily!) come Friday!

A great way to end the week!

Photo Credit: Refrigerator Letters from http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterbox/

I know letter writing is becoming less and less important in this age of email, texting, and Twitter. However, my school was visited by a wonderful group called Colonial Camp last Friday. My colleague, Melissa, had written a fantastic Bright Ideas grant which was awarded and allowed us to bring the field trip to our campus (huge tent, outdoor fire, artifacts, musket firing, and some Colonial gentlemen too)!

Colonial Gentlemen Telling Us About Colonial Life

We learned all about Colonial life through hands-on centers, including quill and ink writing, candle making, war painting, and colonial gaming! It was, well, a blast! The kids loved it!

I thought it only fitting that they write the Colonial Camp folks a letter of thanks. A cool component of the ReadWriteThink website allowed us to walk through this process using an organized fill-in-the-blank template. When they were finished, my kids knew the parts of a friendly letter, and printed out a beautifully typed and bordered letter they were so proud of! I’ll mail all 19 letters out tomorrow via snail mail!

Next time your kids need to write a friendly or business letter, I highly suggest this site to help them keep their ideas and “parts” organized!

Making Beeswax Candles

Today was such fun! For the blog post, I had the kids visit a cool new site I learned about from one of my Twitter PLN buddies called Incredibox. It is an engaging site which turns out to be very addictive (Don’t believe me? Just try it!). It allows you to create rhythms by dragging and dropping various components onto animated characters. As soon as I played with it, I knew I had to share it with my kids!

But, how to integrate it into our curriculum? Well, we’d been discussing using support and reasons for answers you give, so I designed our daily blog post to incorporate these skills and the fun site. Here’s the post (make sure you check out their comments – some of them are priceless!), and click here to see what happened:

Rhythm at the Cove

My favorite comment comes from David, “…this music is like a butterfly lifting you on to the sky of puffy music clods [clouds] of rhythem and beats.” Wow!

Photo Credit: Robyn Hooz’s photostream via Flickr

Every day, to get us warmed up, my kids comment on our blog post of the day. Today I embedded a link to the National Geographic Kids site where short articles are posted about really cool topics. I need to thank Brian Crosby who has an awesome wiki and blog (which you need to follow if you don’t already) called Learning is Messy. I have gotten many ideas from Brian’s 1:1 work in his own classroom.
Well, the kids LOVED reading the articles, and using our new rubric for assessing blog comments, they were engaged in wonderful work this morning. Check out some of their comments here.
In getting used to our new email program I recently had the kids send me an email letting me know whether they liked fiction or non-fiction books more. Here are a few of their responses:

Dear Ms.Collazo,
I like nonfiction books because I like the facts in the book. I learn new stuff every time I read a new book I imagine stuff in the book I feel like the happiest kid on earth when I read nonfiction books. Nonfiction books make me feel like i’m the smartest kid on the earth. Nonfiction is great I would love to read them all the time. I hope everybody will like to read nonfiction books just like me?

Dear mrs.Collazo I like nonfiction books better than I like fiction because they give more information and they are true.They teach you about things you never knew like some bats eat about 500 to 600 bugs each year and they can be as big as your thumb. I never knew that until I read the book.

And, my favorite:

DEAR MRS. CALLAZO,
My favorite is fiction. Because non-fiction is hard to make notes with and because you have to remember all the real things that happened to the person. Fiction its easy because there are crazy monsters and you can remember what happens in the story because it is so funny. And you can picture it in your head while reading and taking the test because all the animals talking you can remember all of it, its just fun you get so in to the book that you don’t want to stop. Like the fiction books i have in the middle of the class i be in the book and then mrs.Collazo tell me to put the book up but she always be happy to see me read. I’ve read about 13 fiction books this year i just peak a book that i like and i read it at home and at school.

Teaching is so much fun!

Photo Credit: samie.shake’s photostream via Flickr