Welcome COMO attendees

Thank you for coming to my session and visiting my blog. Below is my presentation from today's GA COMO presentation Reader's Theater with a Technology Twist.

Reader’s theater with a technology twist

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Books that brought me to tears and guess who

yeah, so this week not one but TWO picture books made me a little teary - you might chalk it up to the fact that my first born asked a girl to homecoming this week and she said YES (his first "date") but even if your first born isn't about to go on his first date, these might make you a misty eyed.

Knuffle Bunny Free by Mo Willems - this book didn't get me until the end - and I won't reveal the ending, but if you enjoyed Mo's previous Knuffle Bunny books, this one won't disappoint. Also, head over to Mo's blog and check out a little audio of him and the REAL Trixie - so sweet!!

The other book is one I didn't expect to get teary over, but did - My Mommy Hung The Moon: a Love Story by Jamie Lee Curtis, illustrated by Laura Cornell. In this book the mommy is a super hero that creates rainbows and bakes cookies and is good at everything. I think I cried at this book thinking of my own mommy, who is still a super hero in my eyes. I am actually getting this book for my Mom for her birthday this month, you are never too old to get a picture book as a gift! Right now in my house (1 teenager, 1 almost teenager and a 10 year old) nobody thinks I hung the moon, so maybe I was a little misty eyed for the days when I got big hugs whenever I came home and big kisses every night before bed.

In Media Center news, it has been BUSY here - and I will post about some of the goings on here next week, but for now I wanted to leave you with a little October project I am starting. I am going to have a MYSTERY person every week in October. I have a picture of the person behind a mask and a few clues about the person. The people are all people that we study here as part of our social studies curriculum. Students can guess who and I will choose some winners for a chance to choose a prize out of my prize box.

can you guess who??




hint: invented many things and was one of the first people to create a library

Wrap up of Where I'm from technology project

I am FINALLY done with the 5th graders and the Where I Am from project. Since I only see each class once every six days, it has taken me quite awhile to finish this. I think this project would have gone smoother if I could have seen the same group of kids four days in a row, they forgot too much in between class sessions., but I guess that is the curse of being a "specials" teacher.

Here is one of the PowerPoints:

I’m from lawrenceville Parker

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I have these fifth graders for two more classes and then they go to the technology teacher until Christmas break. Today I started a digital camera project with them based on the book Flotsam. The lesson came from an idea I read in SLJ earlier this month. Today was my first day, and so far the kids LOVED it. I am doing things a bit differently than was described in the article and I created a step by step guide that they have to follow to take a picture, upload it to a computer and print it out on the color printer - I was so happy that they all seemed to be able to follow the directions. I will upload some of their finished pictures when we are finished next week!

Story Time this week: Edward in The Jungle

Last week I started my first story time of the year. Since my "theme" for story time this year is "Where Can Books Take You" I decided to start the year off "taking" the kids to the jungle with the book Edward In The Jungle by David McPhail.

My activity with the book for Kindergarten was for them to color a jungle animal mask that I had already cut out for them, then I helped them glue on a craft stick to the bottom so they could hold it up to their face like a mask. My activity for first grade was the same, except that I had the students cut out the mask (I cut the eyes for them, and I found this AWESOME tool at Michaels that lets you cut out circles perfectly!)

For my second grade students I decided that I wanted to jump right into research with them this year, so after the story we talked about fiction and non-fiction and I had non-fiction jungle animal books out on the tables for them. We talked about the parts of a non-fiction book (table of contents, title page, index) and I passed out bookmarks that I had made with the name of a jungle animal on them. They then had to find 3 "cool" facts about their animal, using the table of contents and the index, and then write their facts on the bookmark.

The kids loved the book and both activities worked out great.

To end my week last week I had some good news, I had been selected as the Teacher of The Year for my school - it is an awesome honor, especially because the two other teachers who were finalists are just AWESOME teachers (and I am not just saying that...they really are!)

Check out our story time last week!

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!

Off and Running and Where I'm From

What a crazy two weeks it has been, but a good crazy! Lots of orientations (I have almost all the grades done, first grade is this week and Kindergarten next week) and lots of kids checking out books already!

I am teaching a fifth grade special this year. I am splitting the teaching with our technology teacher and I have the first five rotations. The first rotation (we run on a six day schedule) we did my media center orientation (I thought since I had them in here I would get it out of the way.) The second rotation I decided to start a project using our state database system, Galileo. I decided to adapt the lesson plan, Where I'm from in Galileo for my students. Basically, the lesson starts off with us discussing the poem by George Ella Lyon, Where I'm From. Then I introduce them to the Galileo databases and I tell them that we are going to use these databases to find information on the place where we live now and we are going to create a Where I'm From poem and PowerPoint presentation on what we have found in the databases about our town. I show them a sample of a Where I'm from in Galileo PowerPoint (provided in the link above) and I also created a Where I'm From PowerPoint (but I did not use Galileo to find images since I am not from Georgia).

I am planning on this being a 3-4 class project. The first class period I spent explaining the project and showing them examples and then showing them how to save images off the database to their home drives on our server. The next class period will be spent gathering the images for their PowerPoint and writing their poem (the link above also includes a template for their poem). The third and fourth class will be spent creating their PowerPoint.

So far, the biggest obstacle - the kids do not know how to spell the name of the town they live in -Lawrenceville. Now, I can understand if they had just moved to the area, but many of these kids have lived here most of their lives. This was an obstacle I wasn't planning on with fifth graders!

Here is my Where I'm from PowerPoint, hopefully I will be able to share some of my students in a few weeks.

Where I'm From- Northboro

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Back To School

Was it just me or did summer just FLY by. Well, we are back to school and things are already crazy here in the media center. This year I am co-teaching a 5th grade technology special with the technology teacher here at school and I am really looking forward to it - although the first round of the special is regular old media center orientation, i think it will be exciting for the students to learn some new things in the computer lab.
I created a video again this year as part of my orientation - it saves me from having to repeat the same things 36 times, and it is pretty funny. I had some staff kids (including my own son) star in the video - funny thing was, all the kids wanted to be the "bad" examples (like how you shouldn't RUN in the media center). I am hoping to upload it to TeacherTube - while it really is very specific to MY media center, I am thinking that other people might want to use my ideas to make their own. I will post it if I get it uploaded.

I also started off the year by giving my staff goody bags - they were willed with information about the media center, our databases (Galileo) and some of our other subscription services (like BrainPop). I also included a sweet treat - orange creamcicle cookies - it took awhile to bake enough cookies for the whole staff (I packaged them in packages of 3 cookies) but I think it was worth it.

Here is a little slide show of some images from our first week.