We had a great writing session this week. We tried sardines (one of our student's recommended snacks). We used our 5 senses to talk about our experience. We filled out our 5 senses chart and made a bubble map describing sardines. We also made a graph to show how many students liked/disliked them. After mapping and graphing, we wrote about sardines as a class. Then, the students did their own writing.
We participated in an online project this week. We had to get a pumpkin between 1-5 pounds, estimate and count the seeds. Classrooms from around the world participated in this project and posted their results. Our pumpkin weighed 4.5 pounds and we counted 376 seeds. We put the seeds into groups of ten to count them. Our estimations ranged from 1-275 seeds. As an extension in our classroom, we carved an 11 pound pumpkin, counted the seeds and compared the results. The bigger pumpkin had 578 seeds and our estimates ranged from 100-1,000,000. Before we counted the seeds, we made a graph to see how many students thought pumpkin 1 or pumpkin 2 had the most seeds. Most students thought the bigger pumpkin would have more seeds and they were right. Mrs. Keyser carved the pumpkins and we had a drawing for the pumpkins at our party. Ron Lee and Molly won the pumpkins. We also read Pumpkin, Pumpkin and did other related lessons. We made a bubble map to describe the pumpkin and made a double bubble map to compare the pumpkin and an apple. We read the Five pumpkin poem and each student illustrated the poem. We read how a pumpkin grows in the book and each student made a flow map to show how a pumpkin grows. We also used the recipe in the book to make pumpkin seeds and we ate them with our applesauce we made at the Halloween party. We made flow maps to show how we made the applesauce, too. This was a great project and I would encourage other classrooms to participate. Thanks to Marilyn Western for telling the computer class this summer about the site. We are definitely going to participate in more of the online projects.
The address for the internet project site is www.jenuinetech.com.
This week we compared apples to pumpkins. We made a double bubble map to compare and contrast apples and pumpkins. We made applesauce and made a flow map to show the sequence to make applesauce. We ate the applesauce at our Halloween party.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
I use the webcam to record students reading to the class. When viewing the video, I am able to quickly observe many reading skills. I look for directionality, one-to-one correspondence, sight words the student knows, what strategies students use to decode unknown words... Currently, we are working on getting our mouth ready and checking the picture to help us figure out unknown words. We also watch the video in class and discuss what we notice about the student's reading. It is a great way for students to think about their reading.
We read the Wide Mouth Frog story and acted the story out with puppets. Everyone had a chance to participate in the retelling. We also made bridge maps (on display in the media center) to show what each animal ate.
This is one of our writing workshop sessions. We have writing workshop everyday and the students are writing independently for 15-20 minutes at this time of year. I use the videos to assess writing behaviors and to evaluate writing workshop with the students. After I take the video, I show the students and we discuss writing workshop. We talk about "stars" (things we saw that were great)and "wishes" (what we think we could improve next time. The students saw many "star" behaviors and our wish was to improve the noise level during writing workshop.
I took this video so parents can see what we do during reading workshop. The students are "reading" independently for about 15 minutes at this time of year. I try to take videos periodically to use for evaluation purposes. I look at the videos and can tell who knows "how books work", how the students "read" and other reading behaviors. I also show the video to the class right after I take it. We watch it to evaluate our reading workshop. The students look for "stars" (things that are going well or students doing an exceptional job) and "wishes" (what isn't going so well and how could we change it). They are used to the camera and usually don't change their behavior because it is on. When we evaluated this video we had lots of "stars" and we decided we needed to work on the background noise. We will see if that improves in the next video.
