Week 9! All should be fine…but this is real life. See 3rd grade!
PreK:
We kicked off our BEARS unit with two of my favorites that I brought to London from the USA. The good: the stories were well received. The bad: they need more movement, and the riddles weren’t the best for this group. Hmm… Reflection and revision is needed.
Grades K/1:
The final week in our Peter Brown author study! Being that it was the week before Halloween, we read the 2017 release Creepy Pair of Underwear. The goal? To compare/contrast it with Creepy Carrots using a Venn Diagram. Result? Success, even though they’d never used a Venn Diagram before!
Grade 2:
Week 3 of our Haiku Animals unit. This week: accessing PebbleGo and writing 3 bullet-point notes on a chosen animal. And citation, in limited form. Students had a mostly-complete citation on their note-taking form, and they had to discern the part missing…then fill in the blank. It was a developmentally appropriate way to introduce citing sources.
The 2nd graders are across the board in their ability to read/write/note-take. This was a surprisingly successful lesson which had everyone engaged and focused. Next week: videos with ChatterPix Kids!
Grade 3:
Okay. So, these were the best laid plans. Students were going to use Destiny and write reviews using SWBST. BUT. Destiny was being a bear (not its fault…something deeper). Passwords and usernames were changing overnight, and I didn’t know why. When 25% of the class can’t log in, it doesn’t matter how many students there are – the lesson still goes to pot in under 30 seconds. Suffice to say, of my two 3rd grade classes, we only attempted logging in with one. The 2nd did this lesson orally.
Grade 4:
You know those moments when a one-off lesson turns into something more? That’s what happened here. Last week, students gave feedback and input regarding our library home page in Destiny. Little did we realize that the SINGLE link every student chose as a “good” link to keep was this one: Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children
Click the link. What do you notice? As we shared in class, the list was created by the NEA, which is trustworthy organization. However…when was it published? Not one child noticed this little detail: the list was 18 years old! This was the perfect way to teach copyright and checking to see when a website was created. I absolutely love when lessons like this create themselves!
This is going to lead into our next unit: FAKE NEWS, using Laurie Thompson & Ammi-Joan Paquette’s Two Truths and a Lie, where looking at a site’s author is a key skill.
Until then…
Cheers, y’all! –arika
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