Saturday, December 12, 2009

Christmas

What a week it has been! Our school’s Christmas play was last night—they were amazing! We have definitely gone off our normal routine since many classes were shortened or canceled due to play practice but I found it really easy to do a prepared SMART notebook lesson when the class was short. I rarely get to do whole group activities in reading so I took an opportunity to focus on some different things like cause and effect and inferencing.

I decided to sit down and write some thoughts on what is going well and what things need work still. One thing I’m noticing that is a huge advantage is being able to pull up previous lessons. On the regular board, when something is erased it’s gone but I have a “scratch sheet” set up for each topic and I add pages to it each day and save it. That way I can refer back to it when needed. I have been able to print out notes for kids who missed class and also for kids who were there in class but need review. Every teacher has that “know it all” who likes to point out things like, “you didn’t say that!” well, with that particular student in my class I’m able to pull the notes back up and point out where that information has been provided. Very helpful and saves needless conflict.

Another thing that I really like is being able to move objects. If I’m demonstrating writing a sentence and I decide to add a word, I can simply move part of the sentence over and insert the new word. Students enjoy doing this with their own sentences or helping add to other students’ sentences. I am really seeing how this is helping the writing process. Students who have trouble visualizing the structure of an essay can see paragraph structure on the smart board and I’m seeing a lot less confusion and a lot more writing.

There have been some disadvantages though and while I wouldn’t trade the board for anything at all, I do wish I could get to the bottom of some continuing behavior issues related to the board. Sometimes when kids are taking their turn they take forever to answer a question, or they will drag whatever object they are manipulating all over the screen instead of simply moving it to the correct place and answering the question. There is a lot of competition over who uses the board the most. I try to keep things as even as possible but I fear sometimes that they spend too much brain power keeping a running tabulation of who has used the board when and for how long.

Another thing is that I’m finding it harder to keep the class in order when they are using the board. I have kids jumping out of their seats and arguing over who is going to get to touch the board or write on it. I love the enthusiasm and I’m not one of those teachers who insists on perfect hands-folded-on-the-desk behavior but I can’t have chaos either, it’s quite frowned upon. So one of the ways I’ve found to keep things even and orderly is to come up with a random but set order. For example, one class we might take turns by alphabetical order or sometimes by birthday or age (since it’s a multi age class). Other times I’ve passed out president cards and whoever had the older president gets to go first and so on. We’ve had fun thinking of creative ways to take turns and it definitely helps but it also takes some of the spontaneous fun out of things. I think there must be a balance and I’m still looking for it.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Fun with MadLibs

Another great find—funbrain.com! They have this section of Mad Libs stories. The kids not only get to think about parts of speech but they get exposed to a variety of random and sometimes unusual words. The colorful words bounce across the screen and the kids work together, shouting out their word choice as another student chases down their selection. In the end, one student reads the story to the class. I think this is helping kids see how different parts of speech are structured in a sentence and also places where descriptive vocabulary can be used. We used to kill time at the end of class being not so productive but now I have a quick easy and educational filler lesson for those times when we get done a little bit early.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Second Participation Log

Lesson: The Special Verb “be” using http://www.funbrain.com/verb/index.html
First Count: 7/7 (Students absent or at speech)

Second Count: 6/7

Third Count: 7/7
Notes: I had decided to do the log today and I thought maybe I shouldn’t since so many kids were out but it went pretty well anyway. Only one student was off task today. He was playing with something inside his desk and I had to go over and remove the item (an eraser). After that he was involved in the lesson. They really seemed to like the game on FunBrain.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Just Chatting

Well we’ve been trucking along and things are still going well. Of course we had a shortened week last week with the holiday but now we’re back to work. I still teach grammar. I’ve heard a lot of public schools no longer teach grammatical conventions and parts of speech. Wow that is somewhat shocking?! How can kids learn how to write if they don’t understand the basics of a sentence? Well I guess I’m feeling “old school” but I’m teaching verbs right now. I have found dozens of good pre-made SMART notebook activities that I can download but I’ve practiced making a few too. Yesterday I gave a lesson where I used the textbook (oh how ancient) as a guide. I used it for the questions and then I made a word bank. The kids got up in a line in front of the board and I set the timer for 2 minutes. They had to silently answer any question they could and then go to the back of the line. When it was the next student’s turn, he or she had the option of answering their own new question or correcting someone else’s mistake. The goal was to silently answer all the questions correctly in under 2 minutes.

Well can you believe THEY DID IT? This group seldom can get a pencil and paper out in less than 5 minutes and most of the time, working independently from the textbook they don’t come close to finishing the lesson. So this was GREAT! I think a big part of it was that they didn’t get bogged down with the mechanics of writing because they could just drag their finger across the screen to answer a question. Another thing was that they were working together and so one wrong answer didn’t fall on that one person who made the mistake—everyone else had a chance to correct it—so it was a great group activity. Finally, I think the fact that they had to evaluate all the questions AND the answers and were able to complete the activity in a game like setting was a key factor for making this lesson work. I will definitely be trying something like this again in the future.