Readers Theater, Blogging and some news

I can't believe that we are in week four of school, it is flying by already! I will FINALLY be done with orientations this week and I feel like the REAL year can start!

I am again working with our 4th grade focus teacher (what our county calls it's gifted classes) on a Readers Theater project as part of her language arts currciulum. Since this is our second year doing this project, we feel like we have a better idea of what our students are capable of and how to pace the lessons. This year we have two big classes (14 and 16 students) so instead of starting off with just one readers theater script for the whole class, we have had to break the class into two groups. We decided to choose scripts that are related to each other so we can also add in some writing exercises to the project and we wanted scripts with a little humor for our first project. We choose to do two adaptations of the three little pigs stories, The Three Litte Pigs by James Marshall and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka.

We are on week three of our project. So far we have introduced the concept of Reader's Theater to the students, read them the books from which the reader's theater was adapted from and have given out the scripts. As part of this project we wanted to integrate technology into it. Last we we produced a podcast and a slide share slide show (with the students narrating the slides). This year we wanted to start using technology right off the bat, so we started a blog for each class. I wrote the introduction on the blog and we are choosing 3-4 students each class period (each class meets once a week) to blog. This week our question that they had to answer on the blog was: What do you think of reader's theater so far? Each blog entry will be counted as a language arts grade for this class.

Check out our Tuesday class blog here. Check back on Thursday and our Thursday class blog should have some student entries in it. Only one student really knew what a blog was when we introduced it today, but they all got so excited about it, even at bus call today I had students asking if they could come in at lunch tomorrow and blog!

In in other news, today I was announced as one of three finalists for our schools teacher of the year. The other two finalists are SOO much more deserving than I am and are such FABULOUS teachers, but it is such an honor to be recognized - and my Principal gave me flowers, so it was a great day today!