Assistant Principal Shelly Harris surprised our class earlier this week when she congratulated each of our students for their outstanding performance on the shark test (see previous post). She reinforced the idea that their test scores were remarkable in light of the fact that Mrs. James and I did not give a review for the test, and, in fact, the test was a complete surprise to them.
I hooked up the school's InFocus projector to a classroom computer yesterday. SPED Supervisor Linda Harris stopped by and I simply couldn't resist showing her the virtual tour of the solar system on the big screen. "I want to see Saturn," she requested. Good choice. The planet's rings never looked so awesome.
Mrs. James and I are making plans on how to best utilize what I hope proves to be an effective learning tool.
Yesterday, Friday the 13th, marked the release of the 13th (and final) book in the Lemony Snickett saga, "A Series of Unfortunate Events." NPR offers us A Gruesome Guide to Lemony. While our class was waiting to leave on the class trip to the Mesilla Valley Corn Maze, I played one of the four features, Lemony Snicket Reaches 'The End'. It was an excellent piece and I recommend you play it for your upper grade classes. (I haven't had a chance to preview the other offerings.)
Most of our class (all the fourth graders) went on a class trip yesterday to the Corn Maze in Las Cruces. Mrs. James took the school's digital camer, but the camera failed to work, so, sorry, no pix like we'd planned.
Saaron and Jessica, our two fifth graders, helped me count a pile of coins I'd been saving since 2001. (This dovetailed nicely with the money unit we started Monday.) It took us about two hours! (The coins weigh 35 pounds.) I promised a prize to the student who best estimated the total amount. Estimates ranged from $100 to $9,000. Matt took the prize for his guess of $400. The actual amount was $562.40.
Thanks to LCPS Communications Specialist Mike Cook for the fantastic write-up on our blog projects! His writing makes blogs understandable for educators who've never seen one. (One small correction... The artwork is from my final year teaching third grade at Clements High School in North Alabama and not from any Las Cruces students. I thought the kids would like seeing the artwork. My fault. I should have caught the error during the editing process.)
I'm quoted as saying that Our Stories has yet to reach "critical mass." I know what's holding us back. It's the fact that most teachers do not consider time on the Internet as a valid/productive use of class time in light of the huge number of standards and benchmark goals they're tasked with meeting. Even in our class, Mrs. James and I find it hard to allot more time to Internet activities than we already do. (And we do more than the average class. We have an hour of computer lab time on Tuesdays and a half hour on Wednesdays.)
My original vision for Our Stories was to facilitate the flow of ideas among our students (students primarily in the fourth and fifth grades). At present, our class is pretty much talking to itself. Until I can convince the other teachers to allow their students to join the conversation here, I can only consider this blog a partial success, less so, in fact, than our WebQuest blogs.
Really and truly, I'd much rather be pushed off this speaker's platform in exchange for more student voices. One way to do that is to allow selected students to actually post here, instead of being restricted to the comments section. Look for our students' take on their class trip sometime next week.
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