I am still working in the lab, and have been doing some interesting things…

First Grade

I’m starting to show some of my favorite videos, some no dialogue live-action stories that are available on Discovery Education. This week we looked at A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog. I like using these with the kids to teach about sequencing, prediction, etc. as the stripped-down nature of the video really helps the kids focus, and they are extremely accessible for English learners. The only issue I had was cultural, some of the kids thought the boy was trying to catch the frog to eat it, so I had to explain about keeping frogs as pets (and that people do eat frogs too).

Second Grade

Their unit is Our Country. I went back and did some work with Native American topics. I’m more excited about next week when I bring out Google Maps and start to look at geography.

Third Grade

Like a couple of the grade levels they are starting research for writing about a topic. For this grade level it will be Ocean habitats and animals. I provided them with some background information to get things rolling.

Fourth and Fifth Grade

I continue to work on having the kids put together stop-motion animations showing how to solve mathematical problems. We did a basic import of their photos into MovieMaker. Next up, changing the speed, adding narration, and  titles, and then maybe music. It’s all good.

Sixth Grade

This is the grade level that will be moving on from our campus. I have been having them talk about a field trip most took to our feeder Middle School, Cal Middle. They’ve had interesting comments and questions. I’m going to aggregate some of them so we can get answers.

Going forward, I will be having the upper grade students reflecting on the year, and looking forward to next year (both good and bad).