This is a weird couple of weeks because we have parent conferences (with minimum days) backing up onto the Thanksgiving Holiday. My district is one of the few in the area that still has kids come in during Thanksgiving week, so there is this funny 2-day dog-leg of a week. The schedule is all mucked up as I try to squeeze prep time for teacher into 7 partial days.

Here is what is going on:

Second Graders on Kindness. I’ve been using VoiceThread to capture what we are learning. This week’s focus is on manners for hosts and guests. I added some video from a Flip camera and I’m pretty pleased with the quality.

Third Graders are still working on how we interact with the environment in City Wildlife, but we haven’t been doing much writing or VoiceThread, but they are doing important background work by learning keyboarding via Dance Mat Typing. They will be writing a paragraph on the computer in a few weeks.

Fourth Grade seemed cursed. This is a very difficult age, and this particular group of kids seems to have a lot of emotional lability. I made the mistake of direct confrontation and anger in dealing with one class, and they are trying to make me pay for it. I expect it will all even itself out over time, but it’s likely to be unpleasant for all involved for the time being. That was my part, to add to it, the project I was trying to do on PBS Kids Go! Dont’ Buy It wouldn’t work on Firefox. I had to give them an IE page to make it work. So we had both social emotional, and technical problems in altogether in one big happy mess.

Fifth Grade was my just miss of last week, but it went better this week. I had the kids do Inspiration diagrams to show a season, and most did better with a pictorial representation. I’m going to have them give voice responses next week on the VoiceThread. Their work on Galileo there was pretty good.

Sixth Graders are starting to work on research reports. This week was just topic selection. Each teacher is taking a different approach. One wants a compare and contrast of two civilizations, while the other is asking them to form a question to answer. Going forward, I will be working with them on summarizing and paraphrasing vs. plagiarism. Between times, I’m having them add some information to a VoiceThread: