The iPads Arrived!

This is what I saw when I walked into my classroom on Tuesday! I had time to open them up and that was about it. So, I brought them home and got them set up and ready for the first lesson on Wednesday. It worked out perfectly. I've noticed that some of my 4th graders only pay attention to the body of the text when reading nonfiction books so I had been doing a lesson on the different features of non-fiction and the importance of paying attention to them. On Wednesday I had planned on giving them a nonfiction book to use to just go through and find and identify those features.

Instead of a book I gave them an iPad and had them use the Storia app and they had a choice of two books to use on the 4th grade shelf. They were so quiet and engaged the whole 20 minutes that they worked on the activity. On Friday we'll discuss what they noticed about those features and then they'll partner read one of those books.

The Pensive

A group conferring lesson

Just a quick check to let you know how CAFE is progressing this year. In short, I'm loving it! I purchased The Pensive from the Daily 5 site and for me it is totally worth $39. I feel it is keeping me so focused. I entered all 68 students and then put them in groups. Then I use the confer with groups to write my lesson plans. It's great because I can just scroll down and see what I've done in the past. Then I click on the goal and choose my strategy from the drop down menu. If needed I can add a custom goal and strategy as well. I'm making sure I come back and revisit strategies knowing that teaching it just once to my students is not enough. If I'm not sure how to teach a skill I can just click on the CAFE menu in the Pensive and it takes me right to the website and I can read about it or watch videos. In the lesson box I jot down a few notes about how I'm going to teach the lesson and what book I'm using to model the strategy. Once I have my plans done for the week I download the page as a PDF and print it out and move onto the next group. We have to turn our plans in once a month. Last month my principal returned by plans to my room in the morning and as he started to open them I thought for sure he was going to say something negative but instead he told me how much he liked them!

This is what I see when I go to confer with a child. 

Once I begin conferring with students I use my iPad, I click on Confer and then the student's name and then use the same pull down menu and take notes on the child. I used to take notes but often times they ended up being about behavior and not reading. Once again this is keeping me focused. One feature that I just started using this week is the Keeping Track page. I can see at a glance who I need to conference with and make sure no one is slipping through the cracks. The one thing it doesn't do is let me see individual conferences within my groups. That would be quicker than scrolling through all the students.

Pensive Menu

I just did running records on my first and second graders last week. I took notes on each child in a Word document so I could easily print them and give them to the classroom teacher. My next step is to copy and paste those notes in the Pensive so I have all their information in one place and enter their reading level as well so I can track their growth here. All my students have to take the STAR test every 10 class periods. I'm also writing a note in here if the child's score is going up or down. I'm predicting when I go to write progress notes this year it's going to be much easier since I'll have all the information in one spot and it's going to give me good information on how they are doing as a reader.

If you're using The Pensive please let me know how it's going for you.

Tech Links

A new school year and it's time to pull some tech links together for our school newsletter. 

National Geographic -Online Magazines for Kids

Both sites have beautiful photos along with interesting articles on a variety of science topics. 

Young Explorers-K-2

Children can read stories or have the articles read to them. It highlights words as they are read.

Explorer-3-5

More advanced articles.

Great Books for Kids

A site dedicated to helping parents learn about great books for children aged 4-14

Spelling City

This is a free site that allows you to add your child’s spelling words. Your child can take a test and play a variety of games.

Getting Ready for CAFE

I'm getting ready to begin CAFE and my first job is to get the CAFE board ready. Since I'll have 14 classes 1st-5th I didn't want to do one board for everyone since I'll be introducing different strategies with different groups. I also wanted to make sure that each group has ownership to the board by making the strategy cards. So, enter trifold boards. I was excited to find black ones at Staples but not happy with the price which was about $9! Then one day while wandering through Hobby Lobby I found not only black ones but blue, red, purple and other colors as well! And the great news was that they were $3.99. Still not a cheap project but much better than the first option. Right next to the boards was beautiful colors of Duct tape. I left there ready to work! I decided on using one color board for each grade level. Here's a few pictures of the process.

These are the colors I chose.  I'll be adding 4th grade next week so I'll be back to pick up another color for the new group.

I brought in a cutting board to make the process a little easier. I cut the tape in half for the vertical lines.

This is the finished product. I used the Elison cutter for CAFE and printed out the column headers. 

If you look to the right you'll see a brown board. That's where I'm storing my boards. They fold up nicely to fit in that box.

The New Year Begins!

The Reading Room is up and running! I ended up buying some plastic shelves and managed to fit all the baskets in the room. It was music to my ears to hear a parent walk by my room right before school started and comment to their child that my room must be the reading room. Yes, I'm sending the right message. Here are a few pictures of my set up.

The Reading Wagon-a refurbished $11 thrift store find.

I'll digress for a moment and show the original wagon.

And the finished product. The kids love it!

Favorite Author Baskets and more

Beanie Babies to reinforce decoding and comprehension strategies.

Books on the shelves are for my younger students.

My new plastic shelves.

Jack is a good listener for my young readers.

Setting up the Room for Daily 5

Panorama shot of the disaster area my room is this week!

I spent much of June preparing for using the Daily 5 this fall. I brought hundreds of books back into my classroom and sorted and numbered them. I had the students make tags for the front of the baskets and get their book bags packed for the first day of class.

Some of the book tags turned out quite cute!

I've used stickers and letters on the front of my books in the past. To easily change to a new system I  used a Sharpie to write the number on the card on the back of each book in that basket.

I'm using gallon sized Ziploc bags for storing student books. Their names on written on the front of the bag with a Sharpie and then arranged in tubs according to grade level.

Today, I started trying to figure out where I am going to put all these books, I have over 100 categories! I have a nice little room but at the moment I'm challenged as to where I'll put everything. I'm sure I'll be hitting up garage sales this weekend looking for another bookshelf. I have confidence that with some weeding of stuff I won't need this year and rearranging materials I'll find room for the books. Wish me luck!

Out of Memory

I have an 16gb iPad2 compliments of our PTA. When I tried to load some new apps this week I discovered I was out of memory! I knew it was getting low so I had already moved pictures/videos off the device. Now what? Well, my mantra the past few months has been I'm not teaching to the test. No more worksheets and packets that cause the kids to groan and roll their eyes. We will be reading and writing with choices and working skills in through that. Do I want technology to be a choice? Of course. Do I want the kids doing cute apps that are really nothing more than glorified worksheets? Nope. So, that is where I will begin in deleting apps. I want apps that allow reading, recording, listening to good models of reading, writing, story telling, and word work. No matter how cute an app looks if it's just a fancy worksheet out it goes.