Well I didn't mean to ignore my blog here but so many things have happened, not the least of which me being sick... but I'll get back to that.
I've been analyzing my data for my inquiry assignment and I figured I'd make it easier on myself and give myself a stopping point so I could evaluate what I had. So I took a little blogging break.
But I've been keeping some notes on things I wanted to mention. The first and most exciting thing is that one of my students won first place in the speech contest! He was up against, get this, 3 former first place winners! And he beat them all! I could not be more thrilled. He had an amazing speech about what he'd do if he were president-- he earned my vote! I'm thinking of trying to find a way to send the finalist speeches to Mr. Obama himself!
I am trying to reflect on what made J's speech so awesome. He definitely had the drive to win. He was a finalist last year but didn't place so I know he really wanted it. He also is very into politics so this was a great topic for him. But if I could really point out one thing that made this one different from the last was the passion he showed. If you were wondering by the way, he was the one who, after watching the video clips from The West Wing, told me that he felt like he got it. So lots of things combined to help make that an incredible essay and speech but I'd like to attribute at least a small amount of that success to the SMART Board.
Another thing that happened was that speeches ended and we went back to regular instruction. Phew! I love speeches and all but I do think it gets to be a bit much after a while. I started on Adjectives which is always a review for everyone because lets face it, by the time you get to the 4th grade curriculum you've already had adjectives for the last few years. So how could I make it different? Well of course with the SB! There was this one activity I found that was kind of a cross between a cloze procedure and a mad libs. It was this story about a haunted house (they didn't seem to mind it was out of season) and they had to fill in the blanks with words that meant "scary". So I pulled up thesaurus.com and showed them how to search for words which they thought was insanely cool (they seem to have forgotten that I showed them this at the beginning of the year). Then we filled in the blanks of their story. They came out incredibly well and the kids were once again very enthusiastic about participating.
I did notice that we are back to our old behavior problems with regard to the board. The first problem came with writing words in the blanks. It is just not easy for them to write. Some of them don't press hard enough, some put their hand down on the board and that messes up their writing and some write so poorly that the kids can't read it, I can't read it and the board can't interpret it to turn it into print. So I decided after about 15 minutes of letting them write that I would instead have them pick a word from the thesaurus page and I'd write it, turn it to print and then let them drag it into the blank that they wanted and that went much more smoothly.
So finally, we get back to this week. Well I have not been to work the last 2 days because I'm sick. Unfortunately for my students that means no SMART Board for them. You see, there are not many of us at work who are comfortable with the board and the people who graciously filled in for me in my absence were definitely not going to do anything using the board so my poor kiddos had to work in the textbooks which I know they hated and almost made me show up sick just to keep them from that. But I guess they will also appreciate the board that much more when I return. We need to solve this problem either by me training my potential subs on how to use the board or me providing alternative lessons that are more fun that the textbook. Or hopefully I can just not be sick anymore and then it won't be a problem :) So there you have it! Now you're all caught up!
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