Photo Credit: Sleeping on Flickr

I’ve been busy. Between Thanksgiving and this Winter break, I’ve squeezed in a trip to Disneyland, and have been dealing with my 12 year old’s delinquent schoolwork issues (I’ll refrain from further discussion on his personal business, as anyone who has ever taught kids this age will need no further explanation of what’s going on).

Honestly, I’m avoiding “reflecting” at this point. Both because I’m just trying to push through but also I wanted to wait until break before I let myself take on the question of where I’m going professionally. I still haven’t devoted much thought to that, but I’m going to get the ball rolling by wrapping up what’s been happening. I find I do a better job of moving forward when I look back at what I’ve done and where I’ve been.

I promised Parentella that I would give a wrap-up on the Unit Pricing lessons I did with fourth graders. I was going to have them write, but they are not as proficient at typing as I would like at this point, and that was getting in the way. Instead I reviewed what we did and some of their prior answers whole class, then discussed which roll was a better buy. What if you only needed 8 yards? What if you needed 50 yards? I’m not going to claim they all “got it” but they definitely showed growth overall. I also showed them a BrainPop Jr. video on Rounding. This was a really great resource as it gave them a lot of different ways to see how to make the “cut” down or up. Since we had already done rounding in an earlier version of the lesson, this was a review, which is not how I normally use BrainPop, and I think it was a nice one.

I still need to review and reflect on the paragraph writing I did with fifth and sixth graders. It was a really rough, and drawn out process as I tried to port over the writing program they are doing in class, to an online environment. I tried to “keep it together” by having them “reply” to their prior comments, but being kids, they didn’t always do that, and it just got unwieldy. Part of the chaos is because it was the first time, but part of it was how I structured it. I will have to change things, but I’m not just sure exactly how to do that at this point.
Astronomy: Writing About Galileo
Taking a Stand: Writing about Inalienable Rights

For second and third grade, I showed a couple of my favorite stories from Discovery Streaming. I showed the second graders “The Talking Eggs” by Michael Sporn. He does some really great videos that are set in working class/poor urban surroundings.  I showed a re-working of The Red Shoes earlier this year to third graders. I showed third graders a video of “Owl Moon”. I find that some videos are better for what they don’t say. I love the series of live action videos with no dialogue (“Mouse Around”, “A Boy a Dog and a Frog”) because they work so well with language learners, and are great for getting the the “bones” of the story. There is narration in “Owl Moon”, but all the other sounds (effects, background music, etc.) are missing. So when the narrator describes her father making an owl call, it’s followed by silence, which lets the viewer/listener’s imagination fill in the sound themselves.

Going forward, I don’t have any strong ideas at this point, and that’s okay. I’m just happy to have this reflection post done finally. Hopefully it’ll start the ball rolling next week.