Class Blog - here we come!!

I am SO excited about this!! We're starting a class blog on Friday! I have us all set up on Kidblog - our names are in, our background is chosen and we'll be writing our first posts during our ICT lesson on Friday morning.

Today as an introduction to the blogging world we looked at some student and class blogs from around the world. We talked about what we thought about their blog titles - were they catchy and alluring; did they make us want to check them out? We talked about what made a good post and heading - again, eye-catching, interesting content, good writing. We talked about what a good comment was - was it meaningful? Did it address the content of the post? Was it positive?

From the smartboard we moved to our desks and paper blogs. (I can't remember where I read about this idea so I can't give proper credit but it is a BRILLIANT idea!)
I gave all the kids a template on card stock. They then chose a catchy blog title, decided what topic they would write about, came up with an interesting post heading, wrote the date and away they went!
When their entry was finished they decorated their backgrounds and then came the fun part!

Everyone was given 4 different student names and 4 small squares of fluorescent card stock. The girls then read the 4 blogs belonging to the students whose names they had. They left a comment on each blog.

The room was SILENT. Every single child was completely engrossed in reading, thinking and writing. And they loved it. When they'd finished their comments they went back and read the comments on their own blog - then they went and wrote comments on all the blogs of people who had commented on theirs!

I can't wait until Friday to see what they do with the real class blog!

Here are some pictures of my happy little learners today!

Writing comments

                                                

A completed blog post with comments

Reading posts and comments

 

Reading Responses

So...I think I'm going to love these Reading Response Journals! I gave them out to my kids today and, as predicted, the flower borders were a hit.

During our class meeting we discussed the purpose of the journal (to reflect on our reading) and how we were going to do this (by using prompt questions to help structure our thoughts).

Since we began our class reader today (Tree Girl by T.A. Barron) we did a Pre-Reading Response to the book before we even started. It was amazing! Using just the blurb and the cover we uncovered tons of information about the book - we discussed characters, setting, plot; we made predictions; we expressed opinions; we compared the book to other books ("Anna is just like Harry Potter! You know, he was the boy who lived and Anna is the girl who lived" was one comment.)
And remember, we hadn't even started reading Chapter 1 yet!!

After brainstorming we wrote down all of our pre-reading responses - it will be the first page in our Tree Girl booklet that we make. It was 30 minutes of really awesome learning - and not one single child complained!! I think that was what amazed me the most - they were all engaged in the task and really thinking about what they had read and what they could write about it.

After lunch we read the first chapter of the book and practiced one of the reading response question prompts - "Think about one of the characters that you have read about today. What did this character do in the story? What did you learn about this character?" Again, it was amazing to see what the girls came up with - there was some really insightful writing.

Tonight's homework was to use this same question prompt to write a reading response to whatever they read tonight for homework. Everyone has agreed that there will be no more "dipping and changing"; instead they will finish the book they have started and will journal at least three times a week about what they have read.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they all write - hopefully this is going to inspire some of my reluctant readers to take more of an interest in books :)

Hearts and Flowers

I've had a most enjoyable day!

 I've organized my Reading Response Journals which have soul-satisfying multi-coloured flower borders. I just LOVE teaching in an all-girls school :) Of course, I have a fair number of non-girly girls but I know that they're all going to love these journals. This is the second step in my campaign to create a class of readers. (The first step was self-selected genre Bingo cards) I have decided that the Reading Logs are practically useless since about 1/4 of my class "forgets" to fill them in just about every other day. Since reading is so important I am now going to switch to RRJs and see if these will maybe inspire them a little more. The flowered border is to get their attention :)

(I got the borders from Creative Clips by the way if you'd like to visit her store )

Tomorrow we will read through the expectations and practise writing to one of the prompt questions - then that question will be their homework prompt for whatever book they are reading at home.
Last week we started class journals and they have been a huge hit. Everyone wants to read what their friends have written and they're rushing to record and illustrate their thoughts. I'm really hoping the RRJ will grab their interest in the same way.
We start our whole class reader, "Tree Girl" by T.A. Barron this week so we may do some whole class journaling about this book as well. It's a fantastic story and every year my students have really enjoyed it - here's hoping this year's class does too! :)


And... (here's where the hearts come in! ) I finished one of my Valentine packs - full of pastel coloured hearts and Valentine themed Maths problems. Woo hoo!
I am getting READY for February :)

 

You can click here to see it in more detail :)

Liebster Blog Nominees

Part 2 of the Liebster Process:
Just to review - the rules of the Liebster Blog Award (which is awarded by bloggers to bloggers as a way to acknowledge them, encourage them and gain new readers) are:

1. link back to the blog that nominated you
2. post 11 random things about yourself
3. answer the 11 questions posted by the nominator
4. create 11 questions for the people you nominate
5. choose 11 other blogs with less than 200 followers and link to them on this post

On Part 1 I completed steps 1, 2 & 3 and now here are steps 4 & 5:

11 questions:

1. How long have you been teaching and what grade do you currently teach?
2. What advice would you give a brand new teacher?
3. What made you decide to enter the blogging world?
4. Which blog do you really love to read?
5. If you could visit any place in the world where would you go and why?
6. What pets do you have? (If you don't have any - what pets would you really LOVE to have?)
7. When you were a child what was your favorite book? What is your favorite children's book today?
8. Do you speak any other languages? If so, which ones?
9. What is one item you can't live without?
10. If you look up from your computer right now what do you see?
11. What is your favorite charity?

My nominees: (I still have some to add so check back occasionally :) )

Science in the City

Krazy in Love with Kindergarten

Crayonbox Learning

Ms. Shope's Class

Math Science Social Studies..Oh My

All Four Reading

Lessons in Homeschooling

Meatballs in the Middle

Desktop Learning Adventures

New Year, New Ideas, New Possibilities

Today Fun in the Fours is having a guest blogger as part of a linky party by Primary Possibilities. Welcome, Christina!

Howdy! It's me, Christina, from *Bunting, Books, and Bainbridge* guest blogging today at Fun in the Fours!
I'm so excited to join up with this guest blogging party and find new bloggy friends to follow! As the new year gets under way, I'm seeing a lot of buzz on some of the groups I belong to about reading logs and the love/hate relationship that we as teachers have with them. We know we need something to keep kids accountable for nightly reading and we know they need to read at home to continue to grow and progress as readers... but it's difficult sometimes I find a meaningful way for students to "prove" they are doing their reading. I have LOVED the Reading Response Journals my school is using this year as a way to hold my students accountable and interact with their reading AND practice their writing! My building is a 3-5 building and every classroom uses RRJs as part of nightly homework.  The number of nights students write in their RRJs varies by grade-level, but building wide we agree that students will complete them a minimum of 3 times per week, with many teachers having their students do them more frequently than that. Our RRJs are composition notebooks that students have decorated to help them feel more connected to the process. As students read at home, they fill in a log in the front of their RRJ.

The log requires them to list the title and genre of their book, as well as a comprehension strategy they used and will write about in their RRJ.  They also mark off the number of pages read and the AR level of the book they've read. As we teach our students each comprehension strategy we want them to use, they complete a "sample" writing to give us an opportunity for re-teaching and classroom practice.  They glue the sample in their RRJ so that, when they are at home, they have an example of what they should be doing.

In my class, students complete RRJs every night Monday-Thursday.  I read them each day and don't "grade" them, so much as read the content to help me stay connected to what they students are reading.  What I LOVE LOVE LOVE is that I can instantly see who truly understands their book, I learn more about my students, and they can get immediate feedback from me on their writing. They can't wait to come back from their special each day to find their RRJ laying at their spot.  All 26 of them immediately flip to the most recent page (ok... 25 of the 26 do) to see what I wrote.  Sometimes I just give a smiley face.  Other times I ask questions about what I've read or I make a note to "fix capital letters and show me". Now that we've been doing them for half of the school year, my students are starting to see the growth and progress they've made as writers, which always makes me excited when kids get that they get it. I also love that this helps them achieve a deeper level of comprehension.  If a kid is trying to write a narrative summary of a non-fiction text, then I know they don't understand how to internalize what they are reading.  If someone is making text-to-self connections every night that are surface level connections only, I know I need to teach that student to activate their prior knowledge better so they can dig for meaningful connections. I taught 1st and 2nd graders for 6 years before moving to 3rd this year and, if I had known about this before, I SO would have had my littles doing it.  I love getting a glimpse into my students' reading each night and I love that this is something more than "write the title and have your parent sign it". Want to know the weird part...?  The kids love it.  They LOVE RRJs.  They enjoy the occasional break from them... but kids like to write and this gives them an opportunity to select their own reading and then do their own writing about it. I understand the merits of a reading log and, if you're a reading log teacher, don't throw tomatoes at me or anything like that!  But as we constantly seek to make our classrooms the most effective places they can be for student learning and success, I have found RRJs to be an excellent way for my students to connect to their reading and apply their comprehension skills. If you'd like to learn more about my RRJs, check out these posts back at my own blog.

Thank you SO much, Lynn, for having me as your guest blogger today! I hope everyone will continue through this guest blogging loop to discover new blogs and new ideas!

 

Lynn is guest blogging at Collaboration Cuties. You can click the button or the link to go there. Enjoy.

Liebster Blog Award Fun

As a relatively new blogger it's always fun to see comments posted - it means there ARE real people reading this :)

Today Holly from Mrs. Ehle's Kindergarten Connections nominated me for the Liebster Blog Award. This is given to bloggers by bloggers as a way to acknowledge and encourage each other and to help get more readers.

I have to say I went and looked this up to see how it all started but the origin seems to be somewhat shrouded. It looks like it started somewhere in Germany but the numbers (how many followers, how many nominees etc) have changed over time - a bit like that Whisper game :)
Anyway it's very cool and I have enjoyed reading all the questions and answers that I've seen on multiple blogs so it's kind of fun to be doing it myself.

So as a recipient I have to

• post 11 random things about myself
• answer 11 questions that the nominator asks
• create 11 questions for the people I nominate
• choose 11 other blogs with less than 200 followers to nominate and link them to this post

I'm going to do this in 2 parts. So here goes with Part 1 - random things and answering questions.

11 random things: 

1. I live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic that is about 20 miles square. You have to guess which one it is :)
2. I have two children (22 and 23) two dogs (Bear and Panda) one husband (married 25 years) and one tortoise (currently hibernating)
3. My only sister is exactly one year and 5 days younger than me.
4. My entire extended family lives in Scotland - my parents are from Glasgow.
5. I love the cold and am not fond of the heat!! (sadly, the island of which I speak is pretty hot!)
6. I'm vegetarian (trying hard to be vegan but it's SO hard to give up cheese!!)
7. On my son's 17th birthday a tree fell on me while driving. This focused my faith and re-connected me spiritually. My faith is not something I talk about freely but it IS important to me.
8. I love - and I mean LOVE - hiking in Scotland! (even though I wheeze and gasp my way up every mountain)
9. I love Sound of Music (the mountains reminded me of it! :) )
10. I like to eat ice ( my daughter who is beginning pre-professional biology with a view to dentistry, the one who works as a dentist assistant every holiday, tells me it is a terrible habit and my teeth will crack. I figure if she's going to be a dentist I will be entitled to free dentures at some point! )
11. My second toe is longer than my big toe :) (It's a family trait - we all have it)

On to the nominator's questions:

1. What is your own educational background? Highlights: attended a United World College school in Canada (Vancouver Island) university in England (actually I did a BSc in Horticulture :) ) then came to teaching in a roundabout way through Montessori training.
2. Do you shop on TpT? If so what is your favorite product you have found? Well, of course I do! But I don't have a favorite product - there are so many things I love. I'm becoming slightly addicted to clipart I've noticed :)
3. Where are you from? Where do you live now? Born and raised and still living on the above mentioned small island - but we have bought a house in Scotland 30 minutes from my mother and my dream is to move there before I'm 50 :)
4. How many students are in your class? What is the average class size in your district? This year I have 16 students!! The normal class size in our school is 20 - 21; other schools can go as high as 25 students but that's about our limit.
5. What is your favorite tool to use in the classroom? Hmm.. in the abstract that would have to be the principle of "having fun". My philosophy is that since children spend so much time in the classroom it has to be a fun, loving environment. In practical terms I would be totally lost without my task chart clipboard.
6. How do you handle "show and tell" in your classroom? I have to be honest and say that this is the bane of my life - so much so in fact that I banned it this year. I know that sounds dreadful but now, unless it's an amazing thing related to Topic work or something super super special (like a new baby!) we don't do it. 
7. Do you give "rewards" in your classroom? We have a housemark system - given for effort and personal best work. I also give tiny rewards (pencils, erasers) for filling in a line on our Self-selected Genre Reading Bingo cards.
8. How would you describe your classroom management style? Eek - don't ask. I agonize over this every time I'm being evaluated!! I'm super casual, like to have lots of creative projects going all at the same time and can rarely see the surface of my desk - but I love my kids and we have a lot of fun. 
9. What grades have you taught? Only 3rd grade in the classroom but I spent 14 years running the school library and teaching PSHE to grades K through 3.
10. What's the last book you read for pleasure? The Chalet School series by Elinor M Brent-Dyer - a very old (written in the 1930s) children's series about a boarding school in Austria. I read it as a child and have spent years collecting all the titles again (most are out of print now) I re-read it constantly since it's such a "feel good" series.
11. What are your hobbies? I love reading, hiking, quilting (when I have time which is hardly ever now) and creating things for the classroom. Blogging is fast becoming a new hobby :)

So that's all about me. I will now start looking for nominees and post again shortly with my list of nominees and questions for them to answer in Part 2 :)

Professional Development today; children tomorrow

We had an AWESOME professional development (PD) day today!! Granted I couldn't start my classroom until 4.00 so had to stay until 6.00 to get it ready after the holiday cleaning (there was stuff everywhere!) but the day was so interesting and I was so enthused that staying late was perfectly ok.

So what was so great about it?
Well, our school is beginning an accreditation process so we are looking very carefully at curriculum, vertical alignment, horizontal alignment, subject philosophies, aims, learning outcomes etc. Today we spent the whole morning creating a philosophy, aims and learning outcomes for each subject. I was on the Math team and it was fascinating!

Obviously we've done all this in the past but somehow I missed out. Why have I never realized how exciting curriculum development is? I have a new resolution: learn more about this area of education! I already have a list of book titles and am going to immerse myself in this very interesting topic!
(If anyone reading this has any suggestions about reading material, workshops, PD opportunities etc. I would LOVE to know about them!)

In the afternoon we worked in small groups to create unit plans with learning outcomes, subject objectives, assessments and learning skills - it took us an hour to do 1/21 of our part so I'm thinking this will take the rest of the year to complete properly :) But what a GREAT process to be a part of!! I feel totally energized having spent a day looking at all the ways we can improve our learning environment and can't wait until tomorrow to begin (in a small way) in the classroom.

Since it's only going to be a 2-day week we're going to focus on classroom community (what it means to be a good citizen), our new cool Math posters (more of which later!!) housecleaning stuff (homework books etc.) and review. I know I'm going to be missing a few children (who are still on holiday and won't be back until Monday) so we'll keep it simple for the first two days :)

Looking forward to tomorrow and a brand new term!!