Kahoot!

A resource that was valuable to me while teaching a few lessons was Kahoot.  It is an interactive quiz activity that can be done on the Chrome Books.  The Smart Board has the question displayed such as “What is 12+24?” Students are given a set time limit to figure out and choose one of the four answers that are displayed on their Chrome Book screen.  The Smart Board display gathers all of the information from the Chrome Books and presents it.  A teacher can create as many questions as they would like pertaining to any topic they would like.  I used this site as a math review to allow students the opportunity to practice before our exit slip. It keeps them engaged and also explicitly tells me the skills that some students hadn’t picked up during the lesson.  With that information, I can quickly adjust my math lesson for the next day.  The students really enjoyed this activity.

In addition this site provides others learning activities such as Jumble or Podium.          Perhaps your school doesn’t have Chrome books, that isn’t an issue.  The game pin needed can be used on any device such as an iPad, iPhone, Chrome book, or any other type of laptop!  It truly is a great way to have students involved and excited about learning.  This site relates to my own personal philosophy because I believe students should be engaged and active participants in their learning.  I know how much students enjoy playing games and this is the perfect site that ensures learning, engagement, and participation.  As an education, I also value feedback about how to fix my lessons to best suit the needs of my students.  After doing a Kahoot, I can quickly see the misconceptions that students may have.  In fact, I even create the four answers to my math question to see if any of them trigger any potential confusion students might have.  I definitely recommend that you take advantage of this free opportunity.  It can be found here: https://getkahoot.com/

Jaylyn

 

Lauren: Fruits from the Field

The resource I chose to focus on for this blog is Mystery Science (www.mysteryscience.com) due to its usefulness to teachers who may have difficulty coming up with science lessons that both relate to their students and meet the Next Generation Science Standards. My cooperating teacher uses this website to help guide her science lessons, which unfortunately, do not earn enough time in the classroom due to the required time blocks for reading and math.

Mystery Science is a great website that provides “open and go” lessons that focus on a mystery, or an essential question that students will ask themselves throughout the science period. There is an Exploration portion that provides a video introduction, an Activity that provides a hands-on experience for students, and Optional Extras to act as support or extension tools that can help teachers differentiate each lesson or unit.

There are three units for each grade level, and each lesson in the unit is a Mystery, with 5 Mysteries acting as 5 weeks of content. There is also a chart that provides exactly what Next Generation Science Standard each lesson covers, and assessment tools that you can decide to give to your students.

I really loved this website and have signed up for the free trial membership (available until June 2018!); I feel as though science can be an intimidating subject for both students and teachers, and having Mystery Science as a tool as an instructor and focus on the curiosity and questioning as an elementary student will ultimately be beneficial in teaching this subject. This website aligns with my current teaching philosophy, which takes my students’ curiosity and eagerness to learn and cultivates it into something that is so productive and student-activated. It’s a website that I think I would pay for past my membership expiration at $99 dollars a year, and I think everyone should give it a look!

Lauren

Blog Post 5- Natalie

Blog 5- Fruits from the Field

Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Culture of Success and Student Achievement in Schools – Mary Cay Ricci

I thought this book was very interesting to all different types of teachers. My aunt, who is a first grade teacher, keeps this book in her classroom as a resource for when she needs more ideas when building mindsets in the classroom. Building a growth mindset in your students and in your classroom is extremely important for teaching students to continue to learn and grow as learners and as students. This book gives fun and engaging ways to bring a growth mindset into all of your lessons. It also gives you phrases to use within the classroom and ways to approve different situations. I have already used a couple of the ideas mentioned in the book and they seemed to work very well.

 

https://www.edutopia.org/article/classroom-management-resources

This article I found was a great resource because it has links to other resources and many ideas and ways to build a good classroom environment. Included in the article are four main sections with many different resources under each section and why that resource would be valuable helping you, as the teacher, in the classroom. The four sections are: Building Positive Learning Communities, Teaching Rules and Routines, Facilitating Student Focus and Attention, and Addressing Disruptive Behavior. Some of the sections even include short clips of classroom situations and how the teacher addressed them. At the bottom of the article, the author also has given additional resources on the web with classroom management. When I am a teacher/in my field work classroom right now, I would never have to leave this article to find other resources, because they are all placed here and given explanations of why they would be helpful in the classroom.

 

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-social-media-tools-john-mccarthy

I chose this article because it has many different links and other articles that are within the article itself. This is a very useful article for learning more ways to differentiate your lessons through technology. This article gives you strategies to select the right tool for your students, ways to better get to know your students’ interests, and helps you learn different profiles of students. Also, at the end of the article, there is a link to over 100 media tools for explorations to use within your lessons for differentiation.

 

https://www.edutopia.org/article/brain-based-strategies-reduce-test-stress-judy-willis

I chose this article because it has many good ideas to help students through all different grade levels. This article has many great links to help teachers help their own students with assessments. The author of this article is a good motivator and did a nice job explaining how to reduce test anxiety. She does a nice job reducing the cognitive ability and the problem solving skills needed in a test environment.

 

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/5-fast-formative-assessment-tools-vicki-davis

I really like this article and think all teachers should read it because Vicki, the author, encourages teachers to take a deeper look into Socrative and Kahoout compared to what most teachers are experienced too. I’m so glad to finally read an article that is a strong advocate for formative assessment. Typically, what I see in my field experiences, it really gets frowned in many of our schools and consider formative assessment a big mistake when assessing students learning. This article gives five great assessment tools that teachers can use within their classroom when reviewing or learning new information. I have reviewed all of the assessment tools given in this article and totally agree that they are worth any teachers time to work with.

All of the links above are located on a wensite called EdUtopia. These are just a few that my cooperating teacher has shared with me and took ideas from in her classroom.

I recommend every teacher to use both of these resources within the classroom. My cooperating teacher uses EdUtopia lessons in her classroom all the time because they are always coming up with new and creative ideas to engage the students. This website also has many good articles about teaching and how to connect with your students. I found articles related to differentiation, classroom management, how to talk to administration, how to create difficult lessons, and much more.

Lauren: Visual Resources

For my visual creation, I chose to work with Make Beliefs Comix (http://www.makebeliefscomix.com ), which allows those who work with it the ability to create a short comic strip about anything they desire. I chose to work with this type of website because my lesson sequence was focused on students writing a short narrative that retells a small moment in their lives.

If I were to implement this website for my classroom, I would want to emphasize dialogue in writing. The first day would be more about allowing my students to be more comfortable with inserting conversations and thoughts in their work. Make Beliefs Comix is a great way to have my students showcase their memory in a format that intertwines both illustrations and writing. This day would work through a mini-lesson about dialogue and how we can represent both thoughts and feelings in our writing. The only possible downfall of this website is that there are multiple steps involved to insert characters, backgrounds, and kinds of bubbles, but I have created a sample comic strip that my students can use as an example of what a small moment amplified using this website can look like. Being able to actually carry out the process of creating a comic strip in this way also helps me as an instructor be more helpful in explaining exactly how to navigate the website.

After my students have completed their strips about their small moment, I would move onto Day 2, which scaffolds my students’ learning about inserting dialogue through their strip by the use of quotation marks and how punctuation marks can help the readers of our story determine exactly who is speaking. We would then go back to our writing pieces and work with the idea of adding conversation and thoughts in our own narratives.

I think that the use of this website in my lesson sequence will help deepen the understanding of my students and their misconceptions about adding dialogue to a piece of writing. I know that as a student, I was always intimidated by not knowing where to add a quotation mark or where a comma should go that I would sometimes avoid adding conversation at all in my writing. Being able to scaffold my students’ learning in this way creates a sense of fun to a topic that students may dread when reading about the concept of quotations alone, and being able to keep student engagement high during writer’s workshops is so important.

My Make Beliefs Comix Strip:

Lauren

Visual Lesson

My visual lesson utilized Story Jumper and it is an interactive site where students can create their own stories and share them with their classmates.  My central focus for the lesson I created the story for is transitions.  I want student to observe where transitions are used in a text and why they are important in writing.  I definitely recommend this site because it gives students the opportunity to see an example and then create their own using the new strategy they learned.  Together as a group, we will discuss transitions and how we use them.  Once we are finished, students will have the opportunity to go into the site and create their own interactive story using transitions.  Scholars can design the pages, add text, add pictures, and share their work.

As a teacher, you can use it as an assessment to see if students are meeting the objectives for your lesson as well as allow a unique way that all of your students can succeed in.  For example, if you have students who get frustrated writing by hand, this allows them to demonstrate their knowledge using typing.  Some students may become frustrated if they cannot draw well, then they can use some of the pictures that the site provides for them.  Although this definitely isn’t a replacement for writing or writer’s workshop, it is an alternative for students that is enjoyable.

The story I created is called, “My First Day of Kindergarten”.  It exemplifies sequence of events as well as transitions.  Both of these skills will help the students I currently work with and meets the objectives of their grade level.  Another great feature is you can narrate stories with your very own voice! So students can also practicing reading the words they are writing.  Feel free to take a look at my link below and use the site for some of your lessons!

Check out Story Jumper here:

https://www.storyjumper.com/book/index/39392186

 

Jaylyn

Blog 4- Natalie

Blog 4- Visual Blog

https://www.sutori.com/story/love-that-dog-05e6

For this blog I decided to use an interactive timeline to complete a classroom discussion about the read aloud book my class and I have been reading during our poetry week. This is a great book to have a read aloud discussion with my class. It incorporates poetry into a novel with a deeper meaning that my students can understand. I really enjoy this novel because it not only brings in poems from the main character in the book, but it also includes famous poets and their poems throughout the book. It is nice to have many different style poems being presented within the novel because it also teaches my students how to write different types of poems. With the novel itself being about a young boy who is writing poems about his life and his dog he had, shows real life examples that my students can relate to their lives.

This interactive timeline that I created allows my students to keep up with the novel and better understand the novel with guided questions and various short videos. The questions go in sequence with the novel and keep the students on track. While the read aloud is occurring they can pull up this interactive timeline and I can have it up on the board to direct the students while I read. When a question comes up on the timeline or a video comes up on the timeline, I can direct the students and they can type in their answers on the timeline itself. Some of the questions might have more than one answer, so it will be interesting to see what types of answers the students come up with or the comments the students come up with for the videos. Having their answers shown on the projector will then cause a class discussion on not only hat is happening in the book, but deeper thoughts and answers going on in my students’ minds.

The videos I have on the interactive timeline are a great visual for the students because with the read aloud there is only so much the students can listen to and not see with their eyes. The videos give them another experience and understanding to the novel. The videos I have chosen to put in timeline are video recordings or the poet themselves reading the famous poems in the novel that the main character talks about.

Lauren: Teacher Research Questioning

I am currently in Week 2 of this semester’s field experience, and I feel like I’m already learning so much; it’s always interesting to compare different schools and their techniques of building community, implementation of rewards and consequences, and my own classroom teacher’s management styles. I think I am going to learn a lot from both my cooperating teacher and my students.

It is very different going from a fourth grade classroom to a second grade classroom, especially in the sense that they have different social needs. I tend to forget that second graders are more dependent on adults and may require additional prompting for them to complete their needed tasks. My question that I think would require additional study or research is, how do I respond to my students who talk back when I ask them to do something in hopes of placing the blame on someone other than themselves? It seems like almost every time I address a student about staying on task or keeping the volume down, I am met with, “But…” or “Well, someone else was doing…”. At first, I felt bad for potentially reprimanding a student for their actions when another student was doing the same thing that I missed, but I then realized that every one of my students responds in this way and it’s the way that my students cope with being given criticism.

My goal for my students would ultimately be for them to accept the constructive criticism I give them and promptly attend to their work, holding themselves accountable and responsible for their actions. One way that I could research the answer to these questions is to consult the school psychologist, which my cooperating teacher already has been in contact with about mindfulness and keeping calm after recess. I could also look at Love and Logic, whose website (https://www.loveandlogic.com/articles-advice/make-your-kids-responsible-for-their-actions) talks about teaching students to accept their own mistakes and learn from them instead of blaming others.

Lauren

Questions!

 

My first week of school was enjoyable, but also filled with some challenges.  Meeting new students is always a great experience and I always look forward to developing relationships with them.  I’ve had the chance to work with individual students and I’m starting to get to know them a little more each day I spend there.

After my first week in field, I definitely have quite a few questions that could be researched.  One particular one is how do you help students transition to group work if they tend to only do independent work?  Although this has been discussed in our classes, I am curious about the time it takes for a strong habit of group work to form.  Students definitely have to learn to work with one another peacefully before it produces success, so I am wondering how long it takes some teachers to establish this.  Furthermore I wonder how to create peace among the students; how do you eliminate arguments in small group work?  It is important for students to work as a team, but that is hard to create when many of the students are consistently disagreeing with one another.  Research for strategies could certainly be done for this, but I also think that experience also helps with these questions as well.

A great resource that had strategies for working in groups is Kagan’s Cooperative Learning book.  Also going to a variety of elementary classrooms that are dominated by small group work would probably help too.  I look forward to continuing my experience this semester.

Jaylyn

Natalie’s Blog Post 3

The first week in the classroom felt great! I was so happy to get back into action and be out in the field again. I think that the most learning I get out of school is actually being in the classroom and getting to work with the students as an entire class. Writing lessons and being able to actually conduct them to a specific class is such an experience.

The question I decided to focus on for this blog post is: How does the lack of recess time affect learning in the classroom?

The reason why I decided to choose this question to focus on is because I am in a fourth grade classroom this semester and I think recess is extremely important for students. Recess is a time when students can get lose and run around. Children are not meant to sit all day in a classroom and constantly being given information. Everyone needs more than a lunch break throughout the day to get them through the day. Giving the children time to run around and talk with their friends not only gives them the chance to blow off some energy, but it also gives them time to connect with their peers and build relationships.

If the students aren’t given recess, how are they expected to be able to focus all day long? It is not possible for students to give 100 percent clear focus for 8 hours straight, children need that down time. When I was in elementary school, I had two recess hours to get all of my energy out, now schools don’t even have recess time. That is a considerable difference from having two recess hours to absolutely nothing.

To further study this question, you could go to different elementary schools and compare results from the schools that have recess and schools that do not have recess. Also, there have already been a lot of studies on whether recess should be allowed in elementary schools, and most of them say yes. I found a very interesting article regarding this argument and I think everyone should read it.

http://pathwaystofamilywellness.org/Children-s-Health-Wellness/why-kids-need-recess.html

 

Lucy Calkins

 

Lucy Calkins is an innovative educator who has attempted to transform the way students write and engage in their own narratives. She has helped train many other teachers in what she calls a “workshop” for writing. She believes that “writing is a process, with distinct phases, and that all children, not just those with innate talent, can learn to write well”. This is so vital because some of our students may not feel confident in their ability to write, but if we provide them with the correct tools and strategies, each student can be successful. I agree with the fact that Calkins observes writing as a process rather than just a quick task. I feel writing can be an overwhelming process for students considering there are so many parts that are associated with it, such as drafting ideas, revising, editing, and publishing.

Calkins believes that children should be given a “voice” and be the writer of their own stories. I think this is essential for students because they can easily relate with something that directly pertains to them. She values the art of having students use small group discussion to share their ideas rather than a traditional lecture. Lucy also makes an interesting point about allowing children the right to choose their own writing topics because it will develop a stronger will to want to write. Similarly when they have the option to choose their own books to read, they grow a stronger will to read. Her focus is certainly student centered and that can create a successful classroom environment.

Furthermore, she loves giving students freedom to write their own thoughts and at their own pace. She encourages students to keep a “writer’s journal” to freely express their thoughts. Teachers should also give students the opportunity to further develop an idea that a child may have started to write about in their journal. This associates back to her idea of writing as a development process, students can start with a small idea and then really continue to build off that, eventually creating a published piece.

As it pertains to my own future classroom, I plan to use many of the strategies that she includes in the provided article. I definitely think that a “writer’s journal” is valuable because so many students have something to say but don’t feel comfortable saying it in front of other people. The journal could be a powerful tool to let them release some of their feelings into a safe place that they can later go to and reflect upon if needed. In addition, I appreciate the fact that she encourages students to write about a problem that they see in their society. This could make children feel like they are not only being heard but they are being solution based through their attributes in their writing. For example, she may have students write about gender discrimination or poverty. Although some of these topics could be inappropriate for younger audiences, topics can definitely be altered to fit each student’s grade level. By allowing students the opportunity to write about a problem that resides on their mind, truly opens up a door for peer discussion and potentially positive change in the society they live in. Most of the students we have worked with live in impoverished neighborhoods and carry worries that are very heavy. Allowing students to open up about these and be solution based is very powerful and inspiring. I want my students to end each day leaving their society a better place. These writings can certainly influence them to make positive change.

Jaylyn

Sources:

http://educationnext.org/the-lucy-calkins-project/