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/

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

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

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

Today we read a few poems about basketball from our basal. They were written by Charles R. Smith, Jr. and they contain lots of color, various sized fonts, and the placement of the words on the page stress the rhythms of the poems. After talking about how the poems made us feel, just looking at the word on the page, we took turns reading them out loud. The first few kids read with monotone voices, as if they were the most boring words they’d ever encountered! I then told them what a poetry slam was. They looked at me with raised eyebrows and a few snickers. So I took the plunge and read one of the poems in the funkiest, hip-hop, basketball-playin’ style I could! They LOVED it! My only regret is that I didn’t start the video camera rolling right then! Every hand in the room went up. They wanted to give a shot at slamming the poems! We laughed and clapped – it was great!

So, to incorporate our Clams, while the excitement was palpable in the room, we brainstormed things we thought we could write neat poems about. The kids brainstormed and sketched out their ideas the old fashioned way (with paper and pencil), and then opened up Smart Notebook on their Clams. I thought this application would be the easiest tool to use because you can write in many different colors and sizes, AND easily make your word boxes slanted, vertical, or flow in any other direction. It would also allow the kids to draw an image or insert a photograph to accompany their poetry.

What occurred over the next hour was amazing! Splashes of color, words in caps for emphasis, shapes made out of words, hand-drawn pictures, and even some photos (which we learned how to properly credit) filled their screens! Tomorrow we’ll finish them and I’ll post a link so you can be as amazed as I am!

Who knew poetry could be such fun?! Maybe we’ll even hold a Cove Poetry Slam and post our video! Stay tuned!

Poetry Slam at the Cove!

I have especially felt this way over the past week and a half. Although we have the laptops now, we have had to take up several HOURS completing quarterly multiple choice assessments in math and reading, as well as a pencil and paper “on-demand” writing assessment (which, by the way, we will have to assess and file on our own time).

Anyway, I kept thinking, wow, my kids and I haven’t accomplished very much since we’ve gotten the laptops. But then, as I watched them working today I began to make a list of the foundational skills they have learned. Although these skills by themselves don’t produce a wonderful, awe-inspiring project, they are necessary as the foundation of what we will be doing over the next 3 quarters.

Here’s my list. My kids can now:
1. Open and create a document in Microsoft Word
2. Open and create a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint
3. Open and create a product using Microsoft Publisher
4. Login to their school email
5. Send an email to someone in our district contact list
6. Attach a document to an email
7. Save to the common folder on our server
8. Save to their Home folder on our server
9. Open something I’ve saved to the common folder
10. Effectively use our class wiki to find today’s jobs, homework assignments, and today’s blog post
11. Comment on a blog post
12. Comment on someone else’s comment on the blog post
13. Login to Google Docs
14. Submit a form using Google Docs
15. Use the Cove Studies links on our class wiki to spend free time wisely
16. Print documents to our classroom printer (which is not set as the default printer at this time)
17. Toggle between two or more open tabs to complete an assignment
18. Attain their certificate in Internet safety and print it for our wall of fame

That’s 18 different skills they didn’t know seven days ago, so I guess that’s pretty good! I realized how impressive they’re really working when 10 teachers came to my room today for an RSS workshop. Yikes! We teachers don’t learn half as fast as our kids! Love ya, teachers!

Photo Credit: KingdomCatHearts’ photostream via Flickr

“Mrs.Collazo we do need clips or anyting we can attach the id’s.That would be god.Follow up and thats it.”

Precious!

Name Badges at the Cove? Cool idea!

I’ve come to realize that early societal training has our kids very dependent on having the teacher spoon-feed them everything. And God forbid they actually read directions to figure something out! For some I think it is a long-entrenched fear of being wrong (sad). For others it’s pure laziness (maybe not politically correct to say, but often true). I told the kids one of our main goals this year is for each of them to become independent learners/problem solvers – to own their own learning.

So today I had the kids use a sign template in Microsoft Publisher. They were told they were being hired by a new zoo to create signs for the exhibits of “wild creatures” coming to the zoo. The “wild creatures” of course, were the ones they created yesterday at the Build Your Wild Self site. The only directions (you can see them here under the Oct. 21st Science section) were provided for them on a half sheet of paper (step by painstaking step, might I add!).

I made a huge deal about being so excited to see who could figure out this job on their own, or by asking those around them to help them out. By golly (as my Grandpa used to say) they did it! They worked together (after some initial whining that it was too hard) to help each other figure it out! The only assistance I would give was to tell them which step they should refocus on. Before we knew it, it was time for specials and the time spent saving to the common folder was half of what it was yesterday! They are quick learners! Stay tuned for the link to visit our zoo! And might I warn you, keep your fingers out of the cages!

Yikes!

Then we looked at “Today’s Jobs” – a new section I’ve added to our wiki mainly to keep ME organized! It includes all of our activities for the day including any links we’ll be using (hopefully a time-saver).

We spent the majority of our language arts time visiting Disney’s Surf Swell Island to begin to learn and apply Internet safety. The kids kept some hand written notes as they traveled through the site for an activity we’ll do tomorrow as a follow-up.

Math time went very well again. We spent most of our time working together at the Smartboard reviewing telling time (which they continue to struggle with – can’t the world just go with digital clocks?!). They enjoyed the interactive practice and then really loved opening their Clams to try some independent practice at two cool sites!

Finally, our day finished on a very fun note! Thanks to a tweet from my PLN last night, I found out about the New York Zoos and Aquarium’s “Build Yourself Wild” site! Although ultra fun, it also goes right along with our unit (and field trip) on animal adaptations. The kids created themselves as unique wild critters. The really cool part will come tomorrow. At the bottom of their picture, the site provides facts about the body parts they chose and what adaptation they are used for in “real life”. We will use the pictures and facts as a springboard for a narrative writing assignment.

By the looks of things, we’re a pretty wild group!

The asked for dictionaries?