Reflection on Week Three

September21

Lot of great projects underway. It feels like I’ve got a good start going:

Sixth Grade

They are doing a unit on Perseverance. To peak their interest, I showed two music videos, Chris Brown’s Forever, and Rihanna’s Take a Bow. I had students look at the narrative arc of the videos, the visual symbolism, and how it fits into their unit. I also discovered that I mispelled Rihanna’s name. Here are their comments:

Assignment #3b | Sixth Grade Blog
Assignment #3: Analyze a video | Sixth Grade Blog

Third Grade

They are doing a unit on Friendship. In Week 3, we concentrated on “What does friendship look like?”. I had the class pick out photos from Flickr together, I also had them “act out” friendship, and took photos of that. I’ve put them together in a VoiceThread. We will add narration in Week 4.

VoiceThread – Third Graders on Friendship

Fourth Grade

I am still trying to teach fourth graders how to work in a blog environment. Fourth Grade is the first grade where I do blogging. Last week was spent back-tracking to cover how to do a comment, which I had foolishly omitted earlier. I had forgotten that although I have the same kids, not all of them were blogging last year (like the entire third grade, duh). Here are their first comments. Some show real promise.

Assignment #3 | Fourth Grade Blog

Fifth Grade

This grade has an exciting project learning about elections. I started out with a YouTube video spoofing election ads.

Most of the kids seem to have a pretty good b.s. monitor as you can see from these comments:

Assignment #3: Analysis of an Election Ad | Fifth Grade Blog

In week four, we will be looking at actual political ads, including the famous Daisy ad from LBJ.

Related:

Lesson Plans for Week 3

by posted under practice/pedagogy, reflection, weekinlab | 2 Comments »    
2 Comments to

“Reflection on Week Three”

  1. September 23rd, 2008 at 5:02 pm      Reply Nancy Says:

    You remind me of myself—kinda like the plate spinners on the old Ed Sullivan show. I, too, have multiple projects going on all the time. You mentioned comments–I blogged about comments recently. I’m reintroducing blogs this week, the work is not original but might be helpful to your kids. http://areallydifferentplace.org
  2. September 26th, 2008 at 8:47 pm      Reply alicemercer Says:

    NANCY! I thought you were retiring. So nice to see you still in the classroom. Nice share. I will bookmark. I want to work my sixth and fifth graders towards commenting on other blogs this year, so can I keep your blog in mind?

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Howdy! I teach fifth grade at an elementary school in Sacramento, CA. I started my career in Oakland, Ca, and moved here to Sacramento in 2001.

My goals are:

  1. To reflect on how I am teaching, and how effective my practices are;
  2. To integrate and embed technology in the curriculum I teach; and,
  3. To network with other like-minded educators.

To help me reach my goals, I use this blog as a place for me to reflect on best practices, and the practices I’m (trying to) putting in place in my classroom.

My philosophy of teaching is pragmatic (I’ll use what works, and I’m not particularly wed to one theory or another). I want students thinking critically, and engaged in what they are learning (Constructivism), but I know that many of my students (language learners and others) need schema, scaffolding, and explicit modeling, so I’m not afraid to use those as well.

My philosophy of technology education is that teaching comes first, but technology is an awesome tool to use to engage students, and help them create stuff. I prefer that the learning goal guide the use of technology, and not the other way around.

That’s the big picture. Other salient details are that I can be sharp, but I prefer to see the positive and connect with others rather than fighting and argufying. I can be hard on others (having high expectations), but no harder than I am on myself.

I can be contacted here.

Disclaimer

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not those of Sacramento City Unified School District.