Replacing Centers with Menus

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In order to differentiate more, I’m replacing centers in my classroom with menus of activities. I’m using the series Differentiating Instruction with Menus by Laurie E. Westphal to create the menus. I also found the wiki Dare to Differentiate to be very helpful.

The Good

• I’m tapping into the different strengths of my students
• I’m getting good thoughtful projects from most of my students

The Bad

• Accountability for 2nd graders. I had one boy do very little last week. A 2nd boy threw away all his projects when we cleaned out our desks on Friday. We were able to rescue them.
• The pull of the tech. I include both  tech and low tech projects. The Tech ones are still new and shiny and the kids gravitate to them even when a low tech project would be a better fit. I’m also getting some nonsense projects because they want to play with the tech.

The solutions

• Meet more frequently with the kids. Daily check ins with the kids who are having trouble with focus.
• Take up projects more frequently.
• Students must submit a plan for tech projects before they get to touch the tech. Then a schedule is set up for the next day. Child A and B have use of the Ipad 2 from Time to time. Then they must give the Ipad 2 to Child C and D.
• Teaching the kids to video themselves using the front camera.
• Using the Original Ipads for gathering information. I have to see if the mobile part of Discovery Streaming allows student user names and passwords to be used yet. (Saving the clips on the Ipad doesn’t always work – often there is a problem with the volume on the clip being very low even when the volume on the Ipad is turned up.

If you would like to see some of the menus from last week or this week check the links below

Place Value

Fiction Books

Patricia Polacco

When a book is cool but not read

Can you imagine reading only professional books, only poetry, or only the books on the Oprah table? I can’t either. But what about limiting kids to only one level and/or type of text day after day? That’s hard to imagine, too. I worry when we methodically move children through book after book, level after level, all to achieve some target number that labels them-and us-proficient. I worry about their engagement and enthusiasm for reading and learning, I worry about their concluding that reading fast is reading well, and I worry about losing the Adams, the Carolines, the Devons, and the Nicoles…

From Reading With Meaning by Debbie Miller

The problem I’m having is that my students want to check out 5th grade books for the cool factor. When I talk to them about the books it is obvious they have not read them. These are 2nd graders, wanting books that have had recent movies made from the material – or at least using the same name. I’m looking for ideas to solve this problem and encourage the kids to read rather than walk around with the book as an accessory.

Very busy

Stared my first year as a 2nd grade teacher. It has been busy. I hope to get back to posting 5 times a week.

Exhausted

I’m going to bed soon. Had a good day. Got up on time. Got to the gym and worked out. At work I got in a solid two hours before the tech requests came in. I was able to fix a few not all. The new printers aren’t working.

Tried to help our music teacher with Vbrick. We were able to figure out that the connectors from the computer to the switch weren’t plugged in. She was going to call the district person in charge, I didn’t get to ask her if they figured it out before we left.

Meet the teacher seemed to go well. We couldn’t post the homerooms like we have done in previous years. The front office people and paraprofessionals manned tables and handed out homeroom information. 10 of my 17 kids came in. They seem like a good group of kids. I’m looking forward to Monday. I hope to get all my lesson plans done tomorrow before I go to the gym, and then spend the rest of the weekend relaxing.

Heart of a Hero

Each year our principal has a theme. This year it is the Heart of a Hero.  Our first hero is the school secertary, who put in 10 work orders but finally got the school AC working.. They reorded things a bit in light of the AC problem. We were put into mixed grade groups to do a treasure hunt – that got us out of the hot building. Being the Techie person I made an Animoto movie rather than mess with powerpoint. I did it on my Ipad, so I can’t embed the movie. So I’ll link to it. When we got back there was cool air. Relief!

During the day many people were using various tech for the projects. I must have shown a 6 – 7 people how to connect their Ipads and laptops to the guest network. There was certain frustration with the “rules” about guest network. Namely the having to sign on repeatedly and the time limit. I was getting a little frustrated with the “that is a pain” and “it connects automatically at home” comments. Then  I pointed out that if every teacher and student who has a phone that connects with the wifi automatically connected every time we entered the buildings and stayed connected the whole time it would put a huge strain on systems and slow things down. That everyone understood.

We went over the usual procedural type things. Then to finish the day on a high note we had a team building activity. Each grade level team picked a super hero and created a costume for a team member to wear in that theme. This was the results.

We start back tomorrow

Well teachers report back to my district tomorrow. So I’ve been getting things ready here. Made some pasta sauce for dinner tomorrow. I was lucky a thunder storm blew through. No rain, not that lucky. The temperature did drop a little so the house isn’t a total steam bath. I’ve made sandwiches for breakfast and lunch tomorrow and they are in the frig.

My gym bag is packed and by the door. The alarms are set for 3:30 am. I’ll get up and take care of the dogs and stuff. Out the door by 4:00, at the gym when it opens at 4:30. Work out, shower and leave there between 5:30 – 5:45 be on campus at 6:30. That will give me an hour to work on stuff till, staff breakfast at 7:30. (Don’t know what it is, so making back up plan in case I can’t eat it). Our meeting is supposed to start at 8:00 am promptly.

One of my big goals for tomorrow is to get my frig out of Coach’s closet. So it will be ready for me to bring a real lunch tomorrow. I’m brown bagging it all week – except the 18th. I won’t be on campus then. I have a follow up to Imath.

I hope they got the AC fixed this weekend. They had to lift ours off the roof to replace the roof on Friday and the place was a sauna. Seriously they had all of July with the building empty and they waited till August to start replacing the roof. They are also replacing the gutters so hopefully water won’t gush down on people anymore. Not to mention it not raining in the office would be nice.

Productive Day

Ok it didn’t start that way. I woke up 3 hours late, and didn’t make it to the gym. I was able to make it to the Advanced Promethean training.

Great great training. I learned 6 or 7 new things I can do. Several of them I had seen on other flipcharts, but couldn’t figure out how they done. The best was how to put multiple things in a container using keywords.  After training I dropped off my laptop bag in my classroom and did some personal errands. One was to the post office. I was standing in line playing with my Ipad, when the lady next to me struck up a conversation.

She had heard that we were using them in the classroom, but didn’t understand how a toy like that could teach. Well I did kind of have her trapped. The Ipad I had with me was my Teacher Ipad, so I didn’t have a bunch of kids apps on them. I showed her a couple of math apps, explained how cut the rope teaches about physics, and then I explained about my interactive bulletin board with QR codes. When she left she thanked me and said she was impressed with all we could do with an Ipad.

When I got to campus, I did find out that my interactive bulletin board is going to have to change because our science curriculum has been reordered. Hey I’m ready for 2nd semester. I as able to get a unit plan written using the template they gave us at the curriculum training. Then I finished a lesson plan and flipbook for the first day of unit.

Still Organizing My Room

Made some progress with my room.

Right now there isn’t really a back row. I’m thinking of taking the groups to the left and right of the carpet and just putting the desks in a flat row. They can turn them towards each other during small groups.  Each group will get a box that will hold their group’s assigned tech equipment during the day, when we aren’t using it. Each evening it will be put into the box I recieved as part of Imath and that will be locked in the cupboards at night.

I also need to pic up a dish rack. I saw a cool idea of putting the Ipads into a dish rack to hold them while charging and/or syncing. That would solve the problem of people putting things on top of the Ipads, while they are charging.

The pencil bags are for holding  my ActivExpressions. I put Velcro on the sides of the desk and stick the pencil bags to that. That way the Expressions were kept safe and not knocked to the floor constantly.

Activexpression by Danny Nicholson

I’m working on a display for the gray wall that will be interactive. Part of it will use QR codes to allow students to access information in various formats.  More on that tomorrow.

Setting Up My Room

This is what my room looked like this morning when I went in to set up. Typical I forgot to take a picture before I left. I’ll updated this post tomorrow with a end of the day shot.

I’ve been frustrated because I can’t see our new curriculum, that I trained on. Well I can see the new 4th grade curriculum, but now I”m a 2nd grade teacher.  So when I was checking that my Presentation Station computer was hooked up properly, I logged into the attendance program. I’m listed as a second grade teacher there. So I’m hoping that means tomorrow morning I can get into the 2nd grade curriculum. The curriculum is linked to our grade books and the grade book program is updated by the attendance program each night.

According to the attendance program I have 18 kids on my roster, 12 girls and 6 boys. Now I know that will change before school starts in 2 weeks. That is the nature of our school. Right now I have the class set up with 6 groups of 3 each. I have 5 ipads and 2 Itouches. So I’m going to set up 6 tech /supply bags. Each group will either get 1 Ipad or 2 Itouches. When my order from Interact2010 comes in I’ll have 1 ipad per group and one left over.

Great Staff Development

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I just attended three days of training. The workshop was developed in house, with teachers from the district sharing thier knowledge. The book Teaching for Tomorrow provided the framework. There were many terrific things about this workshop.

• We received the book before we left for the summer at the end of school. That way I was able to read it at my own pace.
• It was during thee summer and our follow ups will be during district development days. I hate missing days to attend training. I have 180 days with my kids, I want to spend that time teaching. Saturday workshops tend to make for a cranky two weeks, because of a lack of recharge time. After school that goes past 4 pm result in a lack of sleep due to driving time and need to eat.
• I left each day with multiple ideas that I can use in my classroom. I will be blogging on Rhodes in coming days.
• This was targeted to our teachers and our students. We had people from the main office running the workshop, and people still spoke their minds.
• We are no longer required to follow the script format of our math program. It will still provide the framework and order of topics, but individual teachers will be able to customize and personalize according to our student needs. We will also be able to use project based instruction now that we are free of the script.

Looking forward to the next school year.