Category Archives: my classroom

Wondering if this embed of a whole folder of audio files from Box will work. These are puppet plays that I had students turn into radio plays with Audacity (their first time using the software).

Peace (in the voices),
Kevin

Given the response on my post the other day around doing a paper version of a Folding Story collaboration with my students, I figured it might make sense to do a little video tutorial of me, folding the paper. It’s not that difficult, really, but I’ve been reflecting recently on the use of video tutorials.

So, I set up a time-lapse setting in my Mac’s Stopmotion program and tried to go through the process. The video seems a bit jumpy to me, but it may be my connection here at home.

Peace (within the folds),
Kevin

This year, I have a group of students who are “readers,” and I imagine much of the credit for that is with their parents (thank you) and their former teachers (double thank you). There are signs of this all over the place: the books they bring into class and the number of students who signed up for our library’s Book Club elective (triple thank you to our librarian, Pati). Not every year is as strong a crop of readers as this one, which is a great pleasure to see and to experience as a teacher.

We’re still doing a mix of class novels and independent reading in my classroom, with a slow but steady shift towards more independent reading that will be aligned along the lines of our Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment work (we’re only in our second year of collecting data and I, for one, am just getting more comfortable with the assessments. Now, I need to get more PD on how to use the data.)

For the next few weeks, my students are all choosing their own books to read for class. We spent the first part of the year reading class novels (Flush, Tuck Everlasting, Regarding the Fountain, etc.) so that the framework for being reflective readers and writers should be in place (should be). The other day, we had a discussion about how to choose a good book.

Some of the elements of our class discussions:

• Choose a book that has high interest for you. Don’t choose something that you know from the outset is going to bore you. Get comfortable with a book.
• It’s OK to abandon a book that seems to start strong and then fades away. I let them know that this is what readers do: we make judgments about the books and either continue because we’re interested or abandon if we’re not.
• Be an active reader. Since this is the classroom, I will be forcing some of that reflection on them through the use of reading journals, one-to-one conversations and some reflective open response writing. And this is as much to instill good reading habits as it is to assess them, I think.
• Recommend books for others to read. Since we are a reading community, I want students to be highlighting the books they are in love with and passing that love on to others. I am still considering the best system for this (online or on-walls of the classroom, or both?).
• Challenge yourself as a reader. It’s OK to pick a book that interests you but is a bit easy for you as a reader. Just don’t get locked down into the easy mode. We talked about making sure that you follow up an easy read with one that may be a bit more challenging. The beauty of this shift is that the more challenging books are often also the more interesting, as writers take you off in different directions.
• Pay attention to the craft of writing as you read. Since my students are writing most of the time, I want them to notice the techniques and approaches of the novelists they are reading. (By the way, one of the components of the Benchmark Assessment that I really like is the comprehension element, where one part of the questions deals with ‘beyond the text’ and all of the writing approaches).

To demonstrate some of my own reflective practice, I shared this Prezi that I made last year when I read the novel, Powerless. I found it helped students to see my own thinking as a reader, and made their own responses in their reading journals more reflective, too.

Peace (in the reading),
Kevin

Some you know that I have been having some fun over at Folding Story, a collaborative story site in which ten pieces of a story as put together but the writer only sees the prior “fold” — not the whole story.

I wanted to bring the idea into the classroom, but the site itself is not appropriate for my students. (The crew there says they might be adding “private writing rooms” in the future for educational purposes. We’ll see.)  So, I went the old-fashioned way yesterday: with paper. My students created and contributed to a five-fold story on paper, and mostly, it was very successful in terms of sparking creativity.

The hardest part, believe it or not, was showing them how to fold the paper in such a way so that as the story progressed, the writer would only see the previous fold. In seconds, you could see which kids have some spacial IQ and which don’t. But we got them through it and began. (Essentially, we folded an 8×10 paper into half, and then into half again, and then flipped one of the folds. This gave us five spaces for writing. I had then number the folds, too, so that we knew where we were. An easier way would be to keep it to four folds, but it seemed to me that five was a magic number in terms of a story developing farther enough away from the original.)

After they wrote on a fold, I would collect and redistribute, and they would write the next part while only reading the fold before them. When we got to the last fold, they could open it up and read where the story had begun. We shared a few out with the class. Then, they all got their own original stories back to see where their story had gone.

You should have heard the chatting, and felt the creative energy in the room, as we were doing this activity, which took about 25 minutes. They were very excited to be writing this way, in collaboration with some unknown others in the room. They all were trying to figure out whose story they had and where their original story had gone.  I only had one story during the day that was a bit inappropriate (it included a joke about a butt — no doubt, written by a boy) and after I repeated directions about writing for the classroom, things were fine.

As with the site, there is the potential for inappropriate writing, since the writing is being done with anonymity. I suppose I could have changed that — had them add their initials, or read every contribution as I was collecting them for redistribution. (What I did was I read ones where I wanted to send a message to the writer. I’d stand next to them as I collected their writing and very dramatically read it silently to myself.)

Peace (in the folds),
Kevin

As our collaborative puppet play writing groups are finishing up scripts, I have been teaching them how to use Audacity to record their plays as “radio shows” that are then posted at our class blog site. This recording has a few objectives:

• They get to learn Audacity;
• They keep practicing their plays;
• They are making revisions to the scripts as they “hear” themselves;
• They get to publish their plays before they perform them;
• A few of the groups are realizing that they can add sound effects as they record;
• Others realize that their play is visual and an isolated audio file doesn’t do their story justice;
• All four classes get to hear what friends in other classes have been up to with their plays.

One of the best purchases I have made are a hand of  little headphone jacks, which allow two headphones to connect to one computer. We’ve been stringing them together like Christmas lights so that groups of four can all huddle around a single computer and record, and listen.

Here is one of the plays, along with the beginning of the script.
Listen to Mucho Taco Day.

Peace (in the plays),
Kevin