Read Write Gold

We started a new open court story.  We decided to use Read Write Gold to make a list of vocabulary words. Students read the story and wrote down cool words or words that he didn't know the definition of,  then we highlighted the words in the story using read write gold. Students now have their own vocabulary list that they can use while we do our second read. Tomorrow I will have them write a sentence from the story using the word and decide which definition is the best one for the way it is being used in the sentence.

Super Heroes

Love this!  After our field trio yesterday, we sent home a booklet that was about being a wetlands superhero. This is an agenda note from this morning:

Zoo Field Trip

Today, as part of our animal life cycles unit, we went to the zoo on a field trip. It is decided. Penguins are the coolest creatures! I love how thye just POP up!

Fernie Library

This weekend we went to Fernie for a swim meet. I love to watch my kids swim. One thing I love about our annual trip to the Fernie meet is my kids spend the afternoon and evening hanging out with their friends, having a great time. They stroll the shops on Main Street, go out for bagels, stop by the candy store, play a little ultimate frisbee at the park, swim at the hotel and sometimes even watch a movie. They have plenty of friends and plenty to do. This means I have approximately eight or nine uninterrupted hours of solitude (translation: time to read and to write!)  I just have to make sure they are well fed and they are good to go. And then, so am I. Talk about bliss. Most of the parents hang out, have lots of laughs and gossip together and party it up. I sometimes join them, but now and then what a really need is to be a bit of a recluse. Today I was in my recluse phase. I finished reading The Shadow Throne. Then I explored a bit. 

Confession: I have a thing for libraries. On my computer, the screen saver scrolls through number of pictures of libraries that take my breath away. I dream of spending time in beautiful places like that. Today I found another one! I discovered the Fernie public library. I know. I will say it so you don't have to: I am such a nerd. 

What a beautiful building though!! It was open today from 1-5 pm. It was a beautiful place to spend the afternoon!!  It filled my bucket!

They had me with the arts and crafts style furniture.

Look at those beautiful wooden shelves, and the huge comfy arts and crafts style chairs.

Doors with glass windows. Everything was real wood.

Stairs leading to the metal fire escape.

The stairwell

The view from the stairwell on to the main floor.

I love that the floors and the carpet are well worn.

The kids area of the library. That little fort is made of books. They didn't even look that old or worn out.

Closer view of the amazing chairs.

A book quilt hanging on the wall. So amazing!!

And just like a good library should, it taught me a lot about Fernie. Amazing stories. I hope you can read them in these pics.

....I really should go see how my children are doing.

So long Fernie Public Library. You are a kindred spirit!!

KWL Discussions and Landmines

We started a new unit in science this week. One of the goals in the science curriculum is to help students to see things from another view point. Today we got to work on that a bit. It was an interesting discussion.

We were making a chart of all the things we know about animals, as well as writing down questions we have about animals. Later in the unit we will finish the chart by writing down what we learned in this unit.

We had a lot of great facts to share today. The children in my class know a lot about animals. One boy brought up the idea that chickens were actually once dinosaurs. His comment was met with roars of laughter. He plead for a chance to explain. As he started to explain, I realized that what he was talking about was evolution. I offered a bit of a summary about his comment: scientists have a theory that animals EVOLVE over time (great science word!).....and I explained the idea quite simply. It was interesting to see the reactions. Some students were ok with the idea. Others were really really adamant that this could not be so. It was interesting to see how intense their responses were. It made me wonder if they had heard of these ideas from their parents (the evolution versus creation arguments) or if their religious upbringing naturally brought them to the idea that this was not something they could accept.

I don't know. I usually drop those kind of controversial things quite quickly. I left them with, "It's just one theory. It is interesting to look at many different theories."

Life in the classroom is never dull! 

It reminded me of a discussion the other day when we were writing. Our story was about a kid whose family was going to a wedding. The kid didn't want to go and ended up getting forgotten at home (our own version of Home Alone). We talked about weddings and how horribly boring they can be. One boy piped up that his mom is getting married to his dad and he wouldn't want to miss that wedding. Some of the kids were surprised that his mom is getting married. He confirmed that this was in fact true. Then someone said, "Wait a minute! That isn't how it works! FIRST you get married THEN you have kids!"

We dropped that hot potatoe too. My response was, "That is often how it happens...but not always!" 

....anyway, back to our story!! So...what did our character do when he was home alone??

LOL Teaching: AKA how to dodge the landmines!!

Book Club: The One and Only Ivan

This month we did two books. It turned out to be a really great decision. The overall consensus was that Ivan was a more difficult book then Mr. Popper's Penguins. I think the decisions about difficulty are mostly based on the number of pages a book has. Fair enough.

It was a smaller group again - about 20 students. We had a great discussion about the ethics of keeping animals in captivity, about how animals warm our hearts, and how to change your life when you know you need a change. They were amazed that there really was a real Ivan. We read his eulogy and watched a video of the real Ivan.

We also did a craft. I am starting to realize that a craft is a highly favoured activity. This craft was a repeat of the last time we did this book. We made hand prints. I had blue and red paint. Maybe I should have just had red since that was Ivan's favorite color.

Take away: I need to remember to take pictures during book club!!

Book Club: Mr. Popper's Penguins

Today was bookclub. Usually when we meet, we first eat lunch and have a discussion with the person sitting beside us about the book. After that, we talk as a large group about what we liked about the book, what we didn't like, what we saw that was similar to other books that we have read, etc. This month we are also reading The One and Only Ivan and so many of the children make connections to that book. We had a fabulous discussion.

I found a cute penguin pic (coincidently on a Gr. 3 teacher's blog) and we used her idea to make a display of what we liked about Mr. Popper's Penguins:

- I like the part where he went to the north pole. (Amber)

- I like how Mr. Popper named the Penguin Captain Cook. I love the penguins because they're cute and Miss B likes penguins and she's a teacher. (Victoria)

- I like the part where the French man on a tight rope got distracted by the penguins and fell, then he  swore them in French. (Brady)

- I like when Mr. Popper got out of jail. It was sad when he got in jail. I like Mr. Popper because he like Antarctica a lot. I loved when the Penguins arrived at his house. (Erin)

- Mr. Popper's Penguins was marvelous. My favorite part was when Capt. Cook and Greta made eight cute babies another good part was when Poppers Performing Penguins made plays. (Olivia)

iPads for Re-telling

Our school is blessed with a lot of tools to use for technology. My challenge has been to stop what we are doing and think about different ways we can do it, and use technology for the same activity.

One of the skills we work on is re-telling a story. Today we took one of our Open Court stories and instead if doing the traditional re-telling on paper, we did it in Book Creator.

I was amazed at how I could give the instructions and basically say, now go make this in Book Creator. I didn't show them how to use Book Creator, and magically, they did go do it! They took pictures of illustrations from the book and added the text. Some chose to speak the story instead of typing it. That is okay too - the skill we are testing is re-telling, so if they write or speak, doesn't matter to me!

Not only were they totally able to figure it out, they loved doing it! We had an hour to work on this and at first things started a little slowly, but they got motoring quite quickly. When the recess bell rang they begged to be able to continue working on it.

They never have begged to continue re-telling a story. Never. Ever!

At the end of our work somebody discovered talk to text. This. Is. Going. To. Change. Our. Lives!

EdCamp YYC

Today I had the fabulous opportunity to attend EdCampYYC.

What is Ed Camp? I first learned about this idea on the Nerdy Book Club blog

http://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/10-reasons-why-you-should-come-to-nerd-camp/

(Watch the video)

Then people started blogging about what a great experience it was:

http://litcoachlady.com/2014/01/21/nerdcampnne/

This link is especially good. She has a link to notes from all the sessions:

http://readwriteandreflect.blogspot.ca/2013/07/nerdcamp-round-up.html

So, when it came up in Calgary I decided I had to check it out.

Here are some bog posts about the camp last year:

http://gregmillerprincipal.com/2013/04/21/i-went-to-calgary-and-an-edcamp-broke-out/

http://www.educationrethink.com/2013/02/why-professional-development-should-be.html

This is the website for the Calgary Ed camp that happened today:

https://sites.google.com/site/edcampcalgary/home

I attended four workshops: 

1. Blogging in the classroom.

2. Genius hour

3. Building Literacy

4. Motivating at risk students

Blogging in the classroom was run by someone who has done a little bit of blogging, but wouldn't really call herself an expert. And that was okay! It was good to hear of someone's experience that wasn't taking the blogging world by storm - because I am a far cry from taking the blogging world by storm too! Everyone in the room participated in the group discussion. We asked questions. Some had answers for our questions. And some questions just brought up more questions. 

My take away: I am not sure I am going to move away from the Edmodo platform anytime soon. It is a safe environment and it allows for students to get the experience of communicating more publicly, but on a smaller scale. One person said his greatest success "blogging" on the Edmodo platform came when there were posts about things that were coming up, rather than things that had already happened. He posts messages about special guests or field trips and invites students to watch videos and read about upcoming learning activities. Hey can also have time to come up with good questions. This is something I will definitely try to do more of!

Genius Hour was very inspiring. It is an idea of the company Google. They allow their employees to use  a certain percentage of their time working on projects of personal interest. I can't remember if it is 10 or 20%. The idea fascinated me! Some schools do this with their teachers. Every other early dismissal has some time allocated to Genius Hour. The lady who facilitated the group does it with her students every Friday. It seems like a very authentic way to learn. The interesting thing is it isn't graded. At the end the students do a TED.com style video to explain their project, what they learned, hurdles they had, and how they overcame them. Fabulous!!

Building Literacy was also good. The interesting thing was I learned the most from the other FFCA teacher in the workshop. She shared that she does a program called Something Five (can't remember now!) I need to read up on that. Seems very interesting.

The last hour I hoped to go to an ipad workshop. However, no one showed up to facilitate it. There were about six of us sitting in there. After about 10 minutes we decided we ought to find something different. I guess that is one of the hazards when you have a structure like EdCamp. 

I went and found something different. The workshop I went into wasn't what I thought it was - but I felt weird leaving. So I just stayed. There were a number of teachers all from the same school in Calgary. It is a real high needs area and so their issues are very unique, and quite difficult. It isn't the world I live in at all. Maybe my take away could just be that I sure am lucky to work where I work!

They had divided the participants into two groups. In the other group I noticed someone who looked a lot like Trina Hurdman, a trustee for CBE.  Later, on Twitter, I found out it was her! I really hadn't given another thought except that, "gee, sure looks like Trina Hurdman". I have connected with her on a Facebook and twitter over different issues. I would say she is a bit of an online friend. Too bad I didn't clue in that that really was her! It would have been great to talk with her.

Reading Snob?

I met someone this week who has an undergrad degree and a masters degree in reading. When I heard that this was her background I perked up. A kindred spirit! I was totally deflated when she soon informed me that she really doesn't like to read books though. "I just don't have the attention span," she matter of factly stated.

How can someone teach kids to read, do interventions with those struggling with reading, and inspire kids to read more not be a reader? She really caused me to stop and think.

Her justification was that kids who struggle with reading need to get the skills they need to deal with the informational text they encounter each day. If that can be accomplished, it is a win. And that is all she is concerned about when it comes to reading.

Is it?

Does everyone need to be a reader?

I feel like I am a bit of a reading missionary. 

Maybe I should be less of a zealot??

PD day

Today I spent the day learning to use Read Write Gold. It is quite an amazing tool! by the end of the day my brain was jammed full. Nothing more could fit in! It was a fabulous experience. Definitely time well spent!

Mini Book Club

One thing I love about book club is how, when they leave grade three, they continue to come back and talk about books.

Last year we read the great book, The False Prince. A couple of students let me know they went on to read the second book, in the series, The Runaway King. We chatted often to check in with each other to see if either of us had a copy the last book yet, The Shadow Throne. Today one of my students asked me if I had a copy yet (he has really wanted to read it before I read it) and I told him the funniest thing happened: I borrowed a copy from a friend AND a copy from the library came in - so now I have two copies! He was so excited and begged me to lend him my library copy.

How can I turn that down? We will start at the same time and discuss it after the Good Friday long weekend holiday.

I love it!

Juicy Vocabulary

We are trying to use better vocabulary in my classroom. Sometimes it means thinking of the biggest and fanciest word you know.

Today I was trying to put together a listening center. There was a CD player, cords everywhere, headphones...and it wasn't going well.

Unnamed student: What in the world are you doing, Mrs. Ackroyd?

Me: Oh, I'm just trying to put this thing together.

Un-named student: Wow. Looks tricky. Looks so....succulent!



....good word
....wrong context
....but good word!

We'll keep working on using interesting vocabulary!

Reading Celebration

One of my focuses this year has been to get my students excited about reading. We are getting into the home stretch of this school year and some of my student's interest was waning. Over Spring Break I came up with the idea to make a display of some sort in an effort to spark some reading excitement again. It looks like it is going to end up being a graph. It is a work in progress!

We have worked on this over a number of days. First we brain stormed genres. We had talked about genres a bit this year, but I hadn't made a genre requirement for my students and their reading.

I let the kids lead the discussion and this was pretty much what they came up with. As we started making the chart and talking about the books we have read they realized we needed a couple more categories. Later we added picture books and poetry. I suggested we also add historical fiction, but they ixnayed that one.

The next step was for everyone to examine their lists of books read and get to work filling out a slip of paper for each book they read. For some this was quick task and for others it is a lot more work! They needed to get some helpers.

Some students were finished quite quickly. "I know I have read more books. I should have written them down!" was something I heard more than once!

Mmhm. I think I have said that a few times this year!

Some realized their lists were incomplete, were missing an author name, etc. There was a flurry of activity as they looked the books up on the computer or tried to locate then in our classroom library.

We organized the genres with baskets. Tomorrow I will put the slips of paper up and see how well we are doing so far.

I loved the discussions that came out of this exercise. Great debates developed as they tried to decide a book's genre and they had some fabulous discussions recalling the story line of some of the books. We learned that genre lines are not cut and dry. Magic Treehouse is kind of fantasy fiction, but it all could be non-fiction because it teaches some facts. With some books we had to agree to disagree.

One of the things I didn't anticipate was the fuzzy area about what is fantasy versus realistic fiction. You see, when you are in Gr. 3 witches can seem very real. And it makes perfect sense that if an animal DID eat some magic alligator tongues, it might very well grow to great heights and end up inhabit aging a giant peach. I left those decisions to them. I guess genres can change over time as kids grow!

I think this exercise will accomplish its purpose. Everyone seemed a little more excited about reading, about keeping track of what they have read and about reading more. That is what I hoped would happen!