Friday, December 23, 2011

More Student Directed Learning

Students are finishing their projects on "Idioms." They were asked to research and define idioms and also provide examples and meanings.

Understanding idioms and other figurative language is important as students read and comprehend more challenging texts.

Students were allowed to choose from several web tools to create their projects. Most chose Go Animate, a site I just showed them that allows you to create an animated movie.

Take a look at some of these stellar final products:


GoAnimate.com: cheynise by curran302

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!



GoAnimate.com: Jada 2 by curran302

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Stay tuned for more examples!

Friday, December 9, 2011

Learning Update

Lots going on in our Reading Workshop!

Students have turned in their second reading journal writing assignment (or should have turned it in by this afternoon). I'm very excited about challenging the students to write in detail about their thinking and to support their thinking with evidence from the text. These writing assignments are challenging, and I've been pushing kids to produce their best possible work.

We're also knee-deep in our second "student directed learning" project. During their "station time" they've been exploring the concept of idioms. They've been independently researching and will present what they've learned after Exhibition week.

We have also reached the point where we're taking our student version of 20 Kinds of Awesome "live." The kids have been getting their feet wet with blogging and now we're ready to share our work with the world. Our most recent post is about poetry. All students should have finished it today. You can check out your child's work at kidblog.org/316reads.

We're also working on non-fiction reading and note-taking using a site called Wonderopolis. Kids are using that site to research things that are interesting to them.

AND on top of that, all guided reading books for the three groups must be done by December 19.