That about describes a lot of the administrative response (and my reaction to it) this year. First we were “failing” then, we were “met AYP goals”, then we didn’t. First we had money for computers, then we didn’t and now we do again. Strange as it may seem, the two are related. Funds were freed up to buy teacher lap tops and digital projectors in part to help us address our test score “failure”. I’ve been working my butt off to help the secretary input information for this order, and I’m stretched as thin as a nanotube at this point.
I just don’t have the bandwidth or memory to go through the week in my lab (actually, I owe two weeks of posts), so I’ll take a different tact and just focus in on a particular lesson type rather than go through each grade.
Videos: I’ve found a couple of great videos on Discovery Streaming that have worked superbly well, and use them to explore higher order thinking using Kidspiration or VoiceThread. They are a pair of videos from Scholastic and done by animator Michael Sporn, “The Red Shoes” and “The Magic Eggs”. The videos are based on a Hans Christian Andersen and Creole folk tales but have been reset in the inner-city with poor African-American characters. The stories have characters that are easily recognized and that have some really great lessons for students. The kids seem very engaged in the stories, even though the plots and characters are complex. It’s not just race, but how well the characters and plots are drawn. The kids really seem to identify with them. I had the second graders looking at kind vs. unkind behavior by the adults in the story, while fourth graders looked at what things the characters valued using Venn diagrams in Kidspiration.
Another great find was Owl Moon. The book version is featured in a demo lesson for Smart Boards, but the video did something really interesting. The story focuses on the various sounds the little girl hears as she goes owl watching in contrast to the silence of a winter night. The movie leaves out all the sounds, and just has these silent periods, leaving the viewer to fill the sounds in themselves in their heads. This was good because the third graders who I showed this to, are moving to a unit on Imagination next. I had them use VoiceThread to describe or make the sounds they
“heard”.

The Red Shoes on Google Books
Read Shoes on Discovery Streaming

Original Talking Eggs story
Talking Eggs on Discovery Streaming

Owl Moon story info
Owl Moon on Discovery Streaming