Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Happy Holidays

It has been a BUSY few weeks both here at school and at home - I am READY for a break, although my break involves driving 1000 miles and COLD weather, but that's what Christmas is all about, right??

Here is a slide show of the holiday fun we are having here in the media center - I think I like Whrrl better than Slide.com., but Whrrl is now blocked at school (sigh).

I hope that everyone out there has a FABULOUS holiday season!!

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Reader's Theater Podcast

Here it is, the podcast I did with my students readers theater. It is a little ROUGH, and we definitely have to work on talking LOUDER (and maybe using more than one mic to record it) but it is a start!

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Reader's Theater - Performance Day!

It is finally here - performance day for my 4th grade readers theater group. We performed today for a class of 1st graders who already knew the story (A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon) and who are also working on a little readers theater project of their own in their classroom.

SO, how did it go, you asked? It went well. The kids were a little nervous, so some lines were delivered a little too fast, the kids who we have been telling to GET LOUDER were still reading a bit too softly to be heard, but overall it went GREAT!

Some things the teacher and I are going to do for the next go-around (which we will start after the holiday break):

~ have smaller groups - we will be doing 2 different stories, so I think that will give the kids more lines to say
~ video tape the kids earlier in the process so they can really see what they are doing right/wrong
~focus a little more on the difference between the book and the script (we will do this because the goal is for them to write their OWN script from a book)

As luck would have it, today in School Library Journal there is an article written by Avi (YES that Avi) about the benefits of using readers theater - what PERFECT timing!

I recorded the kids doing a practice run of it last week, but am having problems uploading it to Ourmedia (I haven't uploaded anything to them in a LOONG time, so maybe it's not working anymore??) so if/when I get it up I will put the link on here.

The other class performs on Thursday!