Opening minds…

I read an interesting blog from another teacher in the country. Her teaching practive is similar to one I have come to believe in. Here is her entry:

 Journals are bedrocks in my teaching practice. On the
first day of school I give each child a composition book and a letter
from me which begins like this:

 

Welcome! I am very excited about our year together
and hope you are too. We are going to do all sorts of interesting
things and I hope very much that you enjoy them. One of these will be
corresponding in this journal. That is, we will write letters back and
forth to each other. So, let’s begin by introducing ourselves to each
other. I’ll go first.

Every week or so after this the children write to me in their
journals and I write back. These letters are about personal stuff,
thoughts that arise out of our literature discussions (e.g. “Who is
heroic in Charlotte’s Web?”), responses to prompts related to
the curriculum, suggestions on how to resolve classroom problems, and
about their independent reading.

I love these journals. They are safe places for children to
communicate with me, especially those children who might be too shy to
approach me directly. In them I advise, recommend books, and just
connect to my students. They are such great teaching environments,
places for my students to develop their basic writing skills as well as
their intellectual ones. In these letters they learn to organize
paragraphs, to argue effectively, to write a concise summary of a book,
to critique effectively, and more. As time consuming as it is for me to
write substantial letters back to each of them (as I promise them that
if they write a good letter to me they’ll get one back from me), it is
worth it.

Last week, feeling a need for something new, I changed the rules.
Instead of writing me, they wrote to the class. And now, instead of my
writing back to them, they are all writing back to each other. And —
duh — I realized that I’d just had them do paper blogging. Those
responses they are writing to each other — a form of commenting, of
course! And so I began thinking about having them move from their
composition books to the computer — to start them on blogs. Only one
thing held me back. You may laugh when I write this, but here it is —
handwriting.

Yes, handwriting. Pretty much all the other writing my student do is on a keyboard. They are fortunate to each have a Alphasmart
to use for the year, a small portable word processor. We also have
access to a cart of laptops and so just about all writing is on
keyboards. The one place they must write by hand is in these journals.
What, I’ve wondered, would happen if they no longer had even that to do
by hand. Would their handwriting atrophy before it had even solidified?
What would happen to them in the future if they had to compose by hand?
Would they even be able to do it if we did not force them to
occasionally? However, after speaking to my colleagues, I’ve decided to
move forward with the blogs. They reminded me of other places where the
children will still be writing by hand. Besides, moving from the
journals just seems like such a natural next step now.

I’ll continue to fret about about cursive, script, print and whether
they will, in the future, be able to write legibly and comfortable
using those increasingly obsolete articles — paper and pencil. But if
I’m having a blast blogging why shouldn’t my students have a chance at
it too?

- Educating Alice @ http://medinger.wordpress.com/

So, although not all of my students have access to keyboards and such on a regular basis… what’s your opinion of journals vs. blogs for students?

We’ll be starting Lois Lowry’s novel, The Giver next week.   I’ve been working with my PLC (Professional Learning Community) on how to better weave the MCA-II prep into our existing curriculum.  The MCAs have what is called a constructive response type of question.   It’s like an essay question, but the students are not required to write an answer out.  They can  make a T-Chart, a bulleted list, a Venn Diagram, a mind map (or story map or web) for their answer.   However, we’re trying to get them to not only do that but then also write a statement tying it all together to show that they know how all the information in the answer interconnects.  Easy task, right!   LOL!

I struggled with whether or not to read this story in my classes, but this story has sparked some amazing conversations!   My students have reading and writing disaabilities, and many of them could really relate with Charlie (before the experiment).  As the story goes on, the students raised many questions about the experiment and the underlying storylines.

We’re listening to the story on CD as it is difficult to read the progress reports when Charlie has difficulty spelling.

After the story, we’ll be watching the movie, Awakenings and comparing and contrasting the characters from the story to the ones in the movie.   This is a HUGE skill that will be on the MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments), so it’s important that I integrate this into the existing curriculum…as just teaching “Test Prep” seems to heighten anxiety levels!

I had 2 resources for the kids to use in class for examples.

• Scholastic Dictionary Of Idioms by Marvin Terban
• There’s a Frog in My Throat: 440 Animal Sayings a Little Bird Told Me by Loreen Leedy and Pat Streets

I had the students choose 4 idioms after looking through the books.  They made a poster of each one writing the idiom, its meaning, a sentence with the idiom used properly, and then an illustration of the literal meaning of the idiom.

This went over well!   The kids did a great job on their posters!

We studied alliteration.

We then went through these alliterations in class - reading them aloud.

• Angela Abigail Applewhite ate anchovies and artichokes.
• Bertha Bartholomew blew big, blue bubbles.
• Clever Clifford Cutter clumsily closed the closet clasps.
• Dwayne Dwiddle drew a drawing of dreaded Dracula.
• Elmer Elwood eluded eleven elderly elephants.
• Floyd Flingle flipped flat flapjacks.
• Greta Gruber grabbed a group of green grapes.
• Hattie Henderson hated happy healthy hippos.
• Ida Ivy identified the ivory iris.
• Julie Jackson juggled the juicy, jiggly jello.
• Karl Kessler kept the ketchup in the kitchen.
• Lila Ledbetter lugged a lot of little lemons.
• Milton Mallard mailed a mangled mango.
• Norris Newton never needed new noodles.
• Patsy Planter plucked plump, purple, plastic plums.
• Quinella Quist quite quickly quelled the quarreling quartet.
• Randy Rathbone wrapped a rather rare red rabbit.
• Shelly Sherman shivered in a sheer, short, shirt.
• Trina Tweety tripped two twittering twins under a twiggy tree.
• Uri Udall usually used his unique, unusual unicycle.
• Vicky Vinc viewed a very valuable vase.
• Walter Whipple warily warned the weary warrior.
• Xerxes Xenon expected to xerox extra x-rays.
• Yolana Yvonne Yarger yodeled up yonder yesterday.
• Zigmund Zane zig-zagged through the zany zoo zone.

As a class, we then wrote one for the letter O.

The kids made alliteration books

Cover: Alliteration…what is it? (Students wrote the definition “repeating the same initial consonant sound in neighboring words”)

Page 1 : Choose 4 of the above alliterations and illustrate them.

Page 2: Choose 4 more of the above alliterations and add 3 or 4 alliterative words to each one.

Page 3: Write 5 of your own alliterations.

Page 4: Write 3 alliterations about famous people.

Page 5: Write 3 alliterations about products you use.

Overall, this was a good assignment. Depending on my students, I had to modify the number on each page. Some kids couldn’t handle the 5 of their own.

We went through some comic strips I got from the Garfield, Peanuts, and  Archie official websites.  I ran them off and presented them on the overhead.  We went through the definition of onomatopoeia (a word that resembles the sound it represents).

My students are currently on laptops working on the Comic Creator on Read Write Think! What a great lesson! The kids are printing out their finished work and are quite proud of it! I spent 1 day planning and 1 day designing online. If I do this again, I think I’ll plan better by using a different worksheet that shows the options they have for background, props, characters, etc. It was too hard for them to visualize their plans.