Creative Juices

Lately, if you follow me on Twitter, know me on Pinterest, or are connected with me on Facebook, you  see I haven't been sharing much about education.  More of my time outside of school work has been spent crafting, idea gathering, starting a shop, and sharing about what I'm doing.  My husband never knows what I'm up to.  I will go in the other room, run the sewing machine or hot glue gun for a while, and come back with a creation.  I feel alive!  How can we transfer this feeling to our students who may feel trapped in the day-to-day reading, math, and writing?  What sort of things are you doing to allow your students (or staff, my administrator friends!) to feel alive in their creativity?

Putting it in their words

Kelley Tenkely tweeted this out today, and it totally fit what I was thinking about blogging!

I also wonder why the things we expect our students to know aren't always written in words they can understand.  Students should understand what they are expected to learn, just like I am supposed to understand what I am evaluated on as a teacher. 

Yesterday, we started discussion on our first Essential Learning in reading.  This is the wording that is given on the progress report:

Use text structures to determine main idea when reading text consisting of multiple organizational patterns.

There are some big words in there that some fifth graders might struggle with, so we talked it out.  We read through it, picked out words they knew - like text and main idea - and then took words they weren't sure about - like text structure, determine, conisisting - talked about what we thought they might mean, reworded them, and rewrote the Essential Learning in our own words.

Here's what we came up with:

 
It's not a huge change, but it is written in words that all of my students can read and comprehend.

What are your thoughts?  Should our progress report statements and the Common Core be written in student speak?

Workin on the Chain Gang

Building community continues to be important in our classroom.  A few years back, I came across the chain gang activity.  I really like it because it leads to conversations about how we are one as a class but all have our unique strengths.  Try it with your class and hang the chain proudly so students can see how their individuality is important to our classroom.

Building Community

 

I love how quickly community can be built in a classroom if one makes the effort.  I'm at a new school this year and the teachers I work with in my grade level have made it a tradition that students bring a grocery bag with a few items about themselves to share.  It's really a simple thing, but it has turned out to be a wonderful community builder.  We just finished our second day of school, but it is amazing to me how quickly community has been built.  Sure, by the 27th bag that had been shared, kids were getting a little weary, but I spread it out over the two days not listening to more than 4 students share in a row.  The 27th sharer did get a huge round of applause when she was finished sharing!

I already know that I have a student who collects elephants, a few aspiring gymnasts, some avid readers, some painters, some crafters, a couple aspiring bakers, some sports enthusiasts, one who has 500 silly bands, and that family is very important to many of my students.

I also shared a bag about me.  If you've seen very many of my photos of the day, you will know that I'm a crafter/sewer/baker.  Today as I left, a couple students asked when I was going to wear one of the dresses I've made soon.  After the second day.

We're building community, and I can't wait to see where it goes!

How do you build community in your classroom?  How do you show your students that you want to know them as a whole person?

Lesson from the garden

Tonight I was out weeding the garden. It's been raining cats and dogs here, so I haven't been able to get out there for a while. It was weedy! I was trying to yank handfuls of weeds out at a time and all I was getting was fistfuls of leaves, keeping the nasty roots to the weeds entact. It made me think about how this relates to life and my calling as an educator.

When I was trying to pull out tons of weeds at once, it was messy and unsuccessful. When I focused on one weed at a time, I was able to get the whole thing out, roots and all. There were/are maany weeds, but small steps make progress toward getting the job done.

In life and in my classroom, I have to focus on one thing at a time. Trying to tackle all many things at once can end up messing with many incomplete jobs. Focused, small steps get the job done well. This is huge for me to remember as I enter a new grade level and new school next year!

What lessons from nature have you experienced that relate to your life, school, or classroom?

Collaborative Writing with @jonathanferrell's Class

My students recently worked on collaboratively writing fractured fairytales with Jonathan Ferrell's class in Kansas.

We skyped initially as classes to read some fractured fairy tales from The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.

 

Skyping the first time with Jonathan's class

 

One student reading to both classes from The Stinky Cheese Man

We set up a group on Edmodo where we posted information and shared the links to the TitanPads (We chose TitanPad because it was available to Jonathan's students.  Google Docs would have been a great place to collaborate, but his students don't have access to that this year.) the students would work on.

 

a screen shot from our Edmodo group

The students were so excited!  We split them up into groups of two or three across classes.  It was wonderful because we were also able to schedule it so that students could work on the document at the same time! I checked in on the TitanPads each day so that I could peek in on the group's productivity.

Here are a few screenshots of snippets of students conversations in the side chat box in TitanPad.  Notice that they use text speak in their chats, and that's ok!  Their stories did not include text speak.

 

One student hadn't heard about Paul Bunyon, so he went to learn about it!

 

pondering how to get started

making changes to wording and deciding how to share

The students collaborated for about 30 minutes each day for a week.  At the end of the project, we Skyped again, and many student groups read their stories aloud to the classes.  

 

a student reading his fairytale with his partner

Many of the students posted their completed stories on our blogs:

These links may not be relevant past June as I plan to take down my students' blogs in preparation for next year.

• My class's blog
• Jonathan's class's blog

Afterward, I talked with my group about what they thought about the project.  A few of there thoughts were:

• It was fun to be able to work on the document at the same time.
• It was hard to come up with an idea that everyone agreed on.
• Some people took over the group and wouldn't allow others' ideas.
• I was aware of this and tried to intervene to make sure all authors were a part of the story.
• It was nice to have someone else to give ideas when I was stuck.
• It helped having other eyes to catch errors I made.

All-in-all we came to the conclusion that it had similar drawbacks and benefits that we encounter with face-to-face group work, but it was motivating to work with students outside our building.  It was a good end of the year activity because students were engaged when they were working on their tales together. It's definitely something I would do again with my students.  

How could you apply this to your classroom?  What collaborative projects have you tried?

Choice

Image used from Flickr

Students appreciate the opportunity to be able to choose.  Currently, my students are sharing their poetry projects.  They had to research a type of poetry of their choice, find examples, write their own, and present it to the class in a creative way.  I've been so excited to see what they have come up with.  I've had a variety of presentation types: glogs, a blog, prezis, poems on our blog, books, slide presentations, and just students coming up and talking. 

What sort of choices are you giving to your students?  How can you make your content more open-ended for them?