Today's Meet and Whole Day Plan

They say curiosity killed the cat. I say curiosity is the road to the worlds best discoveries.

Now I'm no scientific genius on the road to a Nobel Prize discovery, but I am curious. So, I decided to try 2 new things in my classroom this week.

The first was sparked from one of my graduate classes, Making Sense for the Struggling Reader. One of the required texts in Richard Allington's book What Really Matters for Struggling Readers. You can find it at Amazon if you want to read it. It looks like this:

Anyway, in the book, Allington mentions the Whole Day Plan. Did you know there's not a lot of research out there in this? I spent hours trying to find something and got zip! I emailed my professor and we decided I would experiement with it. This week I create the Whole Day Plan where I teach only 1 subject all day long. To keep things engaging in the room, I decided to create a schedule where students would do a mini lesson then rotate centers back and forth all day. Yesterday was Math Day. The cool thing was seeing all the light bulbs go off throughout the day instead of throughout the week. The students really enjoyed the change.  Today is Reading Day, so we will see if they are as engaged today as they were yesterday.

Even though I decided to try the Whole Day plan, I didn't want to totally leave out reading a writing. We read literature to go along with the Math Concept and I have a cool way to have students write about Math. I used the website todaysmeet.com. I created QR codes for the URL and posted them on colored paper throughout the room. I had students scan the QR code and log onto the website to chat with each other about the things they learned, questions they had, etc. Since they are in first grade, it took a long time for them to type what they wanted to say, but as time goes on they will get better at it. Here are a few pictures of what the students looked like while they were chatting yesterday.

And one last picture....a screen shot of what the page looks like when you go to create your page. Make sure you safe your unique URL so you don't have to go back and create a new room each time.

Using Skitch to assess student understanding of plot

Last week, we were finishing up a unit on story elements and I wanted a way to assess students on how well they could retell the lot of a story. 

First I showed my students how to use the Skitch app and walked through it step by step. We used a familiar read aloud. Here was my example.

Then students read a book from their book baskets. These baskets are leveled so they are books that students can read an understand independently. The students were to choose a literary text and retell it using the Skitch app. Here is one sample of student work.

The retellings were simple but seeing that this was the first time they had ever used anything like this, I think they did a pretty good job.

Skitch is free from the App Store. Look for this icon.

Skitch has endless possibilities. What are some you can think of?