Second Week

Second Week,

Another familiar feeling during projects.  Frustration.

What have we done?

The two projects from last week update:  Nothing happening.  For different reasons.

2nd Grade
The teachers and students are gathering ideas and working on it.  I really have no input until their work is done.  Then I will do the photographs and talk about how their ideas will show up in a professionally produced poster.  So this is just waiting.  I was at their planning meeting today and they sound like things are fine, they are just not in a hurry.

5th Grade
We are having a lot of trouble with scheduling.  But I am scheduled for next week to present a lesson on research using a website that talks a lot about pioneer life in the early 1800s.  This means I have work to do, but it is not really collaborative work.  Because of our time constraints, I am happy to be contributing at all :)

Grateful for:

Two Kindergarten teachers have classroom blogs and each one has received positive feedback from a parent on them!  Both parents say they love using the blog with their kindergartener as a tool for communication. Instead of, "What did you do at school today?"  "Nothing."  They can say, "I see you were practicing counting to see how many students are in your class?  Let's practice!"  Both teachers are very positive and say now that the blog is set up it takes very little time to update.  Success!

A second grade teacher wanted me to figure out how to set up a blog so she can pose a Challenge Question when they are learning content.  She will have a special set of books in the room on a subject, say, animals, whatever they are studying.  She gets these from the library or from our area resources.  Then each day she will pose a Challenge Question on the blog.  During literacy workshop the students can utilize the books to research the question, and write what they have learned in the comments section of the blog.  These comments do not show up until they are accepted by the teacher.  At the end of the day the teacher goes over the research, the comments, and posts them while talking about the question with the whole class.  Great way to get authentic writing into the classroom!  And I set it up for her today.  Will post again about this after she has used it.  But very hopeful.

Another teacher, a 5th grade Special Needs teacher also wanted a blog.  She wanted one set up like this:  I set up a class website on Weebly.com and added blogs for each of her students.  She wants to (again) ask a question on the website, the students will then have time during the day to post, like a journal, about the question.  There will be a little higher learning curve because the posting has a few more steps to it than commenting, but I am confident they will get it.  Will re-post after she has used it, but very hopeful.

The above blogs are exciting, I think.  Both teachers do the same tasks already, using paper (and journals) and pencil.  Using the blogs makes the tasks more authentic for the students, preparing them for communicating in our connected world today.

So I see a great value to this blog of mine now.  I was so frustrated on Monday, thinking that nothing was happening and I didn't know how to be helpful.  That feeling persisted on Tuesday, but the reality was quite different.  Teachers are asking me for help, and I have been helpful in a couple of instances.  

Yay blogs!