Jeopardy Labs

This is... not PowerPoint! (I totally lifted that from the site)

Found a potentially great resource for my classroom, which I've already shared with the other teachers in my building, that creates interactive Jeopardy templates.

JeopardyLabs features free template creation, and automatic sharing once the template is saved. You can search for existing templates, and also share yours. Each template you create is password protected, so you have the opportunity to go back and edit it later.

One of the things that drew me to this tool was the fact that it lends itself perfectly to my Promethean Board. It also features a scoreboard for teams where you can keep track of points.

It's free to create templates, but there is a donation required for signing up and getting an account, which features an easy way to view all of your created templates in one place and a "fancy template manager" as well. I think it's a great cause and it's by donation, so you can give anywhere between $1 and $20.

I'm considering making a donation as I'll be using this to help a few of my students practice for their Battle of the Books competition coming up in April. We'll see how this shakes out.

Integration success

Today I think I successfully integrated my district reading resources with my own social studies ones, without my kids noticing what I was doing. First time EVER!

Identifying and understanding text features is covered in our building reading program and it was time to review this concept, but I still wanted to press on with my social studies program since we've had so many days off in the past two weeks. Two snow/cold days. A conference day. A waiver day. A holiday. it's taken forEVER to finish this chapter, which should have only taken six days.

Instead of using the suggested model non-fiction text from the reading program, I used our Social Studies Alive! textbooks as a whole-group model. We made a list of the text features we could name off from memory and talked through them before turning the kids loose to find more in their books with a partner.

I pulled some of the reading program tips and encouraged the kids to make mental lists while thumbing through the chapter we are currently studying in Social Studies, then sharing their thoughts with their partner and then finally writing their ideas down on paper.

They worked pretty well for about ten minutes, and then we shared together as a group. We added to our class list and pointed out examples in the text so everyone could find them and spent a little while explaining what kind of information each feature provides. Some of the tricky ones were map scale and map legend/key, but I'm glad we covered those.

Later in the day, I pulled small groups to do guided readings through our Weekly Readers, continuing to point out the text features and important information that each provides. A lot of the kids noticed the maps this time around.

Then in the afternoon we wrapped up our Social Studies with some map skills, which they were required to study the map scale to answer some of the questions. Everything just seemed to work well together, and the kids didn't need to be reminded what a map scale was.

Looking back on it, I was able to cover the reading skills I wanted to review, while continuing to finish up our social studies chapters and incorporating our Weekly Readers, which I tend to fall behind on.

If only every week started off with a day off so that I could have enough time to plan thoroughly, every day could be as smooth.

Polygon Scavenger Hunt: Student Edition

Today for math we spent the first twenty minutes review the different types of polygons. We spent some extra time distinguishing between types of triangles (isosceles, scalene and equilateral), quadrilaterals (trapezoids, parallelograms, rhombuses and squares) and also reviewing angle size and side length.

After some good review time and identifying shapes on the Promethean Board, I set up the activity that would take up the next twenty minutes of class. I said they got to go on a scavenger hunt around the building. Their task was to find as many polygons in the school as they could and provide reasons why those shapes were indeed what they said they were.

We have building-wide hallway expectations, so I reminded the kids about that which encompassed respectful behavior and voice level. I also had one HUGE rule. If there were students in a room, they could not enter it. If the room was student-free, they needed permission from the adult in there. And lastly, if no one was in the room, it needed to stay that way and they had to move on.

They'd be equipped with their notebooks and their teams of five. I told them they didn't need pencils. That was kind of fun, to see their reaction.

We'd use FlipVideo cameras to document their findings. Then I whipped out my example video from yesterday, and showed it to them. I pointed out the things I was looking for in a good explanation during my video example. We talked for a very short time about what was good about the example and what could be improved. Short as in 55 seconds short.

Then we split into teams, kickball style and went off. I stood at one of the hallway intersections of my school so that I could monitor teams wandering around. Then I started to think about some things...

Things I Didn't Consider

- How was I going to make sure they all came back in twenty minutes? Some teams I didn't even see in the hall where I was standing.
- Some kids will have poor videographing skills. I hope they don't stand too far, or zoom in too close.
- Super quiet ones who don't speak loud enough for the camera to hear.
- Should I have given a list? Like at least one of the following polygons: rhombus, square, parallelogram, octagon, etc.

And with five minutes left, I signaled (to the teams that I did see) to make their way back to class.

When it was all over, they turned in their cameras and I told them we'd review all the clips tomorrow and we talked about what went well and what didn't.

Things That Went Well

- Using the FlipVideo cameras was fun
- Taking turns speaking and recording
- Working quietly in the hallways
- Coming back to class on time

Things That Could Be Improved

- Not enough time
- Wanted more turns recording

Overall, I think it was a good first time lesson. I asked the students what did they need to know in order to do this game.

"We needed to know the different ways we name polygons and what makes it that way. Like how a regular quadrilateral is a square because all of its sides are equal and so are the angles."

Here's the video montage of all the clips from the kids that I'm going to show today. There was one clip where the person completely named a shape wrong. It was obvious enough that I know most of the class would pick up on it, so I didn't include it in the collection. I don't know if this is good or not, but I'm going to talk the person about the segment they recorded - maybe rerecord it with them today and then throw it in for a version 2.0 or something. I still really haven't figured that one out yet.

I'd like to incorporate more FlipVideo activities because I saw that all the kids were intensely engaged and were applying mathematical vocabulary (sometimes not as accurately as I'd hoped) to these tasks.

If you have an idea to make this better or a question about something I most likely skipped over and didn't explain, leave a comment.

Maths Lesson, FlipVideo Style

Considering I've had the past two days off, I got to catch up on a lot of my Google Reader subscriptions and feeds. I came across this great site full of Flip Camera resources by means of a Tweet from a friend and I actually had time to check out the link.

There were a few PDFs on that site, and one of them was a Scavenger Hunt guide. So I clicked on through it and found some good lists dealing with Math and Language Arts.

When we weren't having snow ice days, our math group was just getting the hang of naming special polygons and understanding the differences between them. With the four FlipVideo cameras in my room, plus an extra one in the building, I wanted to try this tomorrow.

Since I've got five Flips, I can have five groups with about four/five kids in each one. Have them bring their notebooks with the descriptors of each polygon we've studied and send them out with the task. Find as many polygons and document them on the FlipVideo camera in fifteen minutes around the school.

And then it hit me. I could just see some kids shooting for two seconds at a rhombus painted on the wall and then onto the next shape. I wanted them to discover and support their findings while they were there and capture that on the video.

I needed an example. Well, since we didn't have school today, I couldn't pull a random kid to stand in for my demo, so I had my roommate film me and I did one.

I'll let you know how it goes. And I'll probably upload the student vids to the school website when they're complete.

NEW

Yesterday (Sunday) I went into my classroom and was planning on getting organized and prepared for the upcoming week. Instead, I spent the next six hours rearranging furniture and cataloging my books.

I generally rearrange student desks/teams every quarter, but this time I didn't stop with the kids' desk. I traded in my "big" table for a skinnier one and finally moved in the shelf from the room next door that I was using. I set up my five-armed lamp and moved some book shelves around, too.

[Insert new classroom pictures here]

There was a part in my room where the book shelves blocked a small area out of my sight, and one of my students has been drawn to that place in the past few weeks. So I knew I had to address that issue. In doing so, I found that I needed to reorganize my classroom library due to the vast amount of new books I had collected since the start of the year.

[Insert new bookshelf pictures here]

When my kids arrived today, I had them all sit on the rug. I didn't pay much attention to where I positioned the kids, so I knew I had some tweaking to do before they settled in. After a few minutes of assessing who was seated with whom, I moved a few students next to friends so that they had the opportunity to be with buddies before we got into testing season where everyone will be their own island for two weeks.

In going along with the new room, we proceeded to take the rest of the morning to clean out all of our subject folders and desks. It was a good process for the class, and I think it got them feeling refreshed.

We threw out old papers and failed ideas. Students relived 100% spelling tests and found long-lost library books. One of my kids found a cutie that was given to him on Halloween. It was pretty gross.

Although it took a good chunk of our morning, we still found time to do our Math Fluency progress monitoring before heading off to Art.

***This blog post is part of my new month's resolution to tweet and blog more***

The Kane Chronicles, Book Two - Details Released

The second book in Rick Riordan's Egyptian Mythology series, The Kane Chronicles, debuted it's cover art and official title today. The follow up to The Red Pyramid will be The Throne of Fire. You can view Rick's post over on his blog to view the cover art.

For the next 24 hours, though, you can also read the first chapter of the book on USAToday.com.

The Throne of Fire will be released on May 3. Looks like it would be a great summer read for you 3rd - 5th graders.

Reading Too Much

I was doing some guided reading groups with my 5th graders this week and we were doing pretty good. I had the kids all on the big table and we were reading quietly to ourselves and I was spending about 90 seconds with each kid and making the rounds.

Then after reading a few more minutes, one of the girls says to me, "I can't do this."

"What? You're doing a great job." It's only been about six minutes since we had started.

"I can't read anymore."

"How come?"

"I've got asthma."

Comment guide

Inspired by Comments4Kids, I am planning to start having my students leave comments on blogs written by people outside of our school building.

This will be a pretty exciting next-step for my students and their blogging project.

Before we start doing that, we will have to revisit our expectations for leaving a comment. Hopefully they will recall our classroom discussions around leaving comments. We talked a lot about how sometimes our comments are the only way we are known on a blog or on the internet. We need to think about what kind of impression we are making when we leave comments.

Here is what we use for our commenting expectations.

Commenting Guide

Pertinent It should connect to the original post, or original comment.
Positive You want to encourage the author.
Purposeful Only leave a comment when you have something to say.
Professional Use your best writing conventions - capitalization, punctuation, spelling, etc.

He's a Runner

One of my former students is running Cross Country for Conrad Ball Middle School. He was part of my first class and he'll be someone I'll always remember. He even invited me to his housewarming party when Habitat for Humanity finished with it. I even went, too.

I thought I had written a post while he was in my class, but I can't find it. I remember writing it somewhere, that it was my plan time and my kids were outside running the track. And I remember watching him run, thinking, "This kid was born to run." He just looked like he was made for it. He was fulfilling his purpose. Running.

Anyway, I can't find that post, and I wish I could. But I'm so proud of him.

The Lineup

Last week I got four new additions to my homeroom. They're amazing kids and I'm so happy that they're with me for the rest of the year. I was expecting a roster change in the first two weeks, and now that it's coming up to week number three, I've rolled out my class Wordle.