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.