The judicial system and children's lit

Our social studies standards can sometimes be difficult for first graders, particularly trying to teach government and how it works. One of the answers is to conduct a mock trial.

First we read The Three Little Pigs and began a Venn diagram for the story. Then we read The True Story of the Three a Little Pigs. Before reading, I showed the students and Augmented Reality using aurasma. I created a target for the front of the book that allowed students to see the wolf blowing down the house. This served a video evidence during the mock trial. Anyway, we also read The Wolf's Story. I assigned jobs for the students and they set to work.

 

I don't have pictures of the mock trial but the defense won. They were able to convince the jury that the video evidence was digitally edited and that the Wolf was innocent. And I also think the defense attorney found her calling!

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?

New Books

Some professional reading I recommend:

I am taking 2 classes right now and the professional reading is phenomenal. The first book is called Catching Readers Before They Fall by Pat Johnson and Katie Keier.



This book is a great read for beginning teachers and seasoned teachers alike. This book is mostly about helping struggling readers but it has already made me think about my own theory of reading education.

The next book is called Best Practices for Best Practices in Early Literacy Instruction by Diane M Barone and Marla M. Mallette.



This book is more about how research has informed the best practices for Early Childhood Education. I haven't started reading it yet, but I am sure that this book will challenge me to improve my practice.

Both books are available on Amazon.

What books are you reading for professional growth?

Popplet ABC Books

In first grade, kids are practicing with letters and sounds. In the beginning they need practice just knowing their letters. Our Grae level team came up with the idea of creating a MHW ABC book for things we found around the school. Here are some examples of the slides we created for the ABC book. We assigned each child a letter and here are the things they came up with. 

Real Reading vs. Fake Reading

Our class learned all about what's our independent reading time should look like. We made a chart for real reading vs. fake reading. Then I took pictures of my class and they wrote sentences about their reading. Here are some of the pictures and sentences they came up with.

Fake reading is a book on top of your head.

Real reading is looking at the book.

Fake reading is playing with your books.

Real reading is eyes on the book.

Fake reading is sleeping with a book on your head.

Real reading is turning the pages. 

Then we made a bulletin board for real vs fake reading. I still reference this from time to time when students aren't reading as they should.

What things do you do in your classroom to help students understand how they should read independently?

Using Popplet to introduce yourself

One of my favorite apps for classroom use is Popplet lite. At the beginning of the school year, I used Popplet to do an introduction of myself to the class. I inserted pictures and wrote sentences in this graphic organizer to tell all about me.

Then, I showed students how to use Popplet so they could create their own. The great thing about this is now students have a graphic organizer that can be saved to the camera roll and printed. Students can use their graphic organizer to write a paragraph about themselves.

Popplet has endless possibilities. How could you use Popplet in your classroom.