Of Julapa-Julapago, Nerds, Snowmen and Permitious Berms

puppets 2010 (60)

We’ve moving slowly towards holiday break (not done yet!) and we’re moving slowly on collaborative script writing for puppet theater, too. Slowly, for sure, but making decent progress. The general concept behind the project (see handout for the project) is that each group of three or four students has developed a story line based somewhat on a fictional holiday idea, is writing the script and making original puppets, and then will perform for younger students in our school sometime in January.

Meanwhile, I had groups also post what I termed “the elevator pitch” of their story to our class blog site. The whole idea here is to narrow down a story into a three to five sentence summary. This is a skill that some students really struggle with, I find. What I notice when we do this “elevator pitch” activity is that it sparks new discussions among the group about the core essence of their stories.

Here are a few that got posted yesterday (more will get done today):

Our puppet show is based on a holiday called Permitious Berm Day. The characters are Veronica, Chippy Dippy and the Narrator of the story. The problem the play faces is the day of Permitious Berm Day, and Veronica hates the holiday, but loves to shop. So she heads to the mall instead and runs into a Permitious Berm Day mascot (Chippy Dippy), who convinces her to like the holiday, after singing and arguing. In the end, Veronica goes home and had a special feast for the holiday.

Jour De Bon Bons is about a girl that hates candy on Candy Day. Her little robotic sidekick friend Phillipe is French, love candy, and loves Candy Day (in French, Jour de Bon Bons). Martha makes a giant Veggie Monster to get rid of Candy Day. Carl, a town boy who goes crazy for candy, defeats Veggie Monster by making a giant mint candy to clog him.

Our play: The Real Story of the First Moon Mission
It is about how, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin go to the moon, they find that the moon people need their help to save the moon from Evil, who wants to destroy it in order to prove his power. Neil, Buzz, and the moon people try to turn Evil good and they…
We can’t tell you how it ends! You’ll have to watch the show!

Our puppet play, (No Homework Week) is about two kids, Rock and Brick are ready for no homework when the homework liking nerd Sebastian hypnotizes their classroom’s teacher to give everybody homework. Then Rock and Brick go on an epic journey to get Sebastian to un-hypnotize their teacher. To find out more watch our puppet play.

Our puppet play is called Snowman Day. It is a day where everyone in the town makes snowmen that come to life! But one boy named Frank hates winter and rather would have a endless summer and builds a heat machine to melt the snow.So a boy named Joe who loves winter must stop him from ruining the holiday.

Julapa-Julapago is a holiday where friends give each other presents. A bully beats up on a group of friends because he’s jealous. So he ends up becoming friends.

A few observations:

  • The Permitious Berm group decided to completely make up a wacky idea with made-up names. I asked if they meant “pernicious” but they insisted, not. Permitious.
  • The group doing the “Jour de Bon Bons” play has been using Google Translate to come up with some lines said in French. They are three girls, laughing their way into French words. It’s very funny to watch.
  • Why is it the “nerd” and “geeks” of the world continue to be the ones desiring extra work from the teacher? In my view, those kids are the ones doing things on their own, not looking for extra assignments from school. (Don’t these kids read Boolean Squared?)
  • More than a few groups liberally “borrow” plot ideas from holiday movies they have seen (see Snowman story). I don’t mind that they be inspired by that, but I do encourage them to move beyond that, if they can.

Peace (in the puppets),
Kevin

How We Might Use Our iPod Touches

Itouch 8

Finally, it appears, our classroom set of iPod Touches may be ready for action. We received a small bit of grant money for the set of Touches, but then, we had to wait for a sync/charging station, and now, as far as I can tell, the devices are just about ready to roll.

In some ways, we had bad timing in the purchase of the Touches, because if we had waited a month, we could have gotten the upgraded versions with cameras and (I think) microphones embedded right into the units. Instead, we have the older versions. I would have loved the video, audio and image element.

Still, our push is to use the Touch devices in Science (the heart of the grant) but I am sure I am going to steal them from time to time for work in my Language Arts class. I am perusing the ideas here with Tom Barrett’s Ways to use the iPod Touch, which is a great resource.

I like the ideas of:

  • Collaborative flashcards
  • Collaborative stories
  • Google surveys
  • Type Drawing for visual stories (new one to me)
  • Martian App allows you to create an alien (and then your partner has to draw a replica based on descriptive language)
  • Story Kit for writing and publishing a book
  • Using iPadio for interviews and sharing at our blog (hmmm — I will need a little iPod microphone, though)

Peace (in the touch),
Kevin

Here, as I finish up Progress Reports/Report Cards

standards report card ela
It’s the day we hand out our trimester Standards-based Progress Reports and I am doing some last-minute tinkering on a few of my students. We made our shift last year to this style of reporting (based on standards and expectations of students by the end of the grade they are) and I have to admit, I am still trying to get the hang of it. (see the sample ELA section above)

One one hand, the sublevels are more detailed, so the specific skills are theoretically easily to identify. I can more easily identify a student who might be strong in reading but weak in writing, as opposed to a grade average (say, a B-minus) that was balanced out by those two areas. It also is designed to show a progressive set of learning over the course of the year.

On the other hand, though, it’s not always clear what piece or work, or pieces of work, resemble a “meeting” of the standard, since we haven’t really gone through as a regional school district and brought out exemplars to say, This is what a Meeting the Standard looks like for this category. That seems to be a real missing piece of this process. We’ve had grade level meetings and all that, and we’ve had good discussions, but never something that concrete. (Am I saying that we need a district-wide writing assessment for my grade? Maybe.)

We’re left to a judgment call, once again, although this time, it is more defined, and we do have student work that we collect to fall back on as “evidence” of their progress in the standards.

Very few parents like this system, at least from feedback that we get (although the ones who like it may not be vocal since they like it) and the students still get confused about what a P and an M mean, particularly when I emphasize that they should not equate an A with a M, and a B with an P, and so on.

But I don’t see us moving away from standards-based reporting and in fact, with the Common Core on the near horizon, it will probably be going through some major revisions and revamping.

Peace (in the reporting),
Kevin

Wandering off to “Imaginary Lands”


I have a huge stack of Imaginary Peaceful Land Travel Brochures and just in time for the report card crunch time, too! Just kidding. My students did a fantastic job on this project. The task: invent an imaginary land that uses elements of our school’s Peacebuilders program and tap into expository and creative writing to create a brochure, including a brief history, descriptions and a map.

I will probably pull out some ones that struck me as very creative in the next week or so, but for now, I am sharing the music video of some of the projects (I took so many pictures that it was too long for Animoto, so I need to create a second one).

Notice how many of them used elements of design: color, layout, images. We talked about design elements here, looking at real brochures, and I was happy to see so many students remembering that and using it in their projects.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

The Imaginary World of Musical Island

musical island
After Thanksgiving break, my students will be handing in their Imaginary Peaceful Land Travel Brochures. They’ve had plenty of class time to work on the project, and there are some pretty neat lands out there.  I had created my own, too, to share with them. I used Glogster and I think the future, I might have it as an option for my students, too. But I do like having them use cardstock paper for a brochure — that feels right. But with Glogster, they could add audio and video, etc.

Anyway, here is your invitation to Musical Island:

Peace (in the

Action, Adventure, Writing, Assessment

Graphic Stories 001
I’m about halfway through grading an adventure short story project, which means at this point I have read through about 40 short stories from sixth graders. I’ve been pretty impressed so far with the writing as many of the stories have improved drastically from the brainstorming sessions, the peer review activities and the rough draft stages that they went through to get to a final story they could be proud of.

We focused a lot on character development, points of action to move the plot forward, conflict and resolution, and establishment of setting to inform a story.  They have a rubric to guide them, and we look at examplars of adventure stories.

This is the first year I had students (two boys) ask if they could create a graphic story instead of a textual story. Now, I have graphic novels all over the room, and we use a webcomic site pretty regularly, and it seemed wrong for me to tell these young writers, no, graphic novels won’t be allowed for you as writers. Plus, I was interested in what they would. I did warn them, though, that the same rubric and standards should guide them as well as everyone else. I wanted them to know a simple comic strip would not hold muster for this project.

One student was more successful at the creation of an adventure graphic story than the other was, but I was impressed with both. Even the weaker of the stories showed character development in ways that might not have happened in a short story (this student is a struggling writer) and the graphic story opportunity gave him another way to write. It was clear that he used a character that he had already “developed” and was probably using in stories written at home, on his own. I wanted to validate that kind of writing in the classroom, too.

Other things that are jumping out at me right now with the stories I have read:

  • Some students get the idea of a “kicker” or twist at the end of a short story. This requires real critical thinking skills, and not all sixth graders are there yet. One story — The Homework Machine — is about a group of kids trying to steal this Homework Machine, only to find out at the very end that it GIVES homework, not DOES homework. That was a nice Twilight Zone twist.
  • Technology has crept into many of the stories. One story is all about a brainiac young kid nicknamed Intel, who uses his ability to fix things and make things for this spy story. There are some vivid descriptions of cool tech toys, like a version of James Bond for kids.
  • A couple of students have attempted stories that include time shifts — pushing the reader back and forth in time as the narrative slowly unfolds. This is not easy to do and doesn’t always work. But just planning that kind of story out requires deep thinking. What foreshadowing do you use?
  • A few stories move from one narrator to another, bouncing back and forth between what we assume are the protagonist and the antagonist, only to discover that our assumptions are wrong. Again, it’s hard to pull this off. One story, about a spy looking for a gadget that turns out to be a mechanical spider which can clone itself, unfolded perfectly, so we felt sympathy for what we think is the antagonist, and then the story turns itself around.

Some trends that I am seeing that I need to work on with them:

  • In some stories, the narrative point of view suddenly shifts. For example, the writer sets up a character that we see in Third Person and then midway through the story, the words “I” and “we” are inserted and now we are in First Person. I suspect this comes from starting a story one day and then working on it another day.
  • The formatting of dialogue continues to be a struggle for some students. We worked on this a lot in class — with writing prompts, reading examples and looking to novels. I pushed hard because I know they have not been taught this much in the past, and their urge is to write a short story as OneSingleParagraph.
  • Resolving a story is so much more difficult than setting a story into motion. Even with graphic organizers and work on plotting out the plot, you can tell just by reading which students got lost halfway through their story and struggled with how to end it. Even us adults have this problem — an idea sparks, flow and then sputters.

I’m off to read another 40 stories.

Peace (in the reflections of assessment),

Kevin

Lead Mines, Canals and Crashes: Digging into Local History

Soho History (2)
I’ve written before about my co-teacher, and here is another example of how his ideas and my ideas play off each other so nicely. We’re reading Regarding the Fountain by Kate Klise with our co-taught class right now. The plot has to do with a fifth grade class doing research on the local history of their town, and uncovering a plot of fishy intrigue.

Bob, my co-teacher, thought we should do some research on our own town and then let the kids build a timeline of sorts of local historical episodes. Of course! So, I dug around the town’s website for some information, and Bob found a book that was published in the 1970’s by the town’s Historical Commission. We cobbled together a small packet of information, created a timeline that was missing either dates or information, and then had then work in teams to fill in the timeline. From there, they had to then create a placemat of the history of the town, organized in any way they wanted.
Soho History
Not only were the kids interested in the history of the community, they were fully engaged in all steps of the project, which took about thirty minutes. It was just one of the lessons that comes together collaboratively, and sparks something in the students that is just wonderful to watch. They were learning about history, using information reading for a realistic goal, creating timelines of information and collaborating together. That’s a nice bit of learning going on.  Not every lesson is like that, that’s for sure. But this one was.

Here are few things they didn’t know about their town but now do:

  • The town became a town because of a Lead Mine operation;
  • The New Haven-Northampton Canal ran right through the town, and when that shut down, the railroad followed. Now that is shut down, and the hope is for a bike trail (which is controversial in the town);
  • Sen. Ted Kennedy was once hurt in a plane crash (and the pilot died) in some fields not too far from the school;
  • The movie “Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (with Richard Burton) shot some scenes in a local restaurant in town;
  • An adjacent city tried to annex the town in the 1960s but failed when the town used its political might to fend off the plot (which led to cheers from the students when we talked about it).

Peace (in the discovery),
Kevin

Last-Minute Anti-Bully Lesson Revamp

PeaceBuilders Pledge

Do you remember that song by Jane’s Addiction, Standing in the Shower Thinking? (raise your hand). This morning, I was standing in the shower, thinking, and mulling over our new requirements to integrate more anti-bullying lessons into our day (it’s now the law in Massachusetts, although what that means is still being sorted out).

I do a morning meeting (Circle of Power and Respect) that I learned from The Responsive Classroom, and that is a great way to start the day, as it leads to discussions about social issues and allows everyone a space to share and participate. And at this point in the year, the students are totally in charge of the morning meetings. I mostly sit and participate.

An email from our principal yesterday, though, has me wondering how to do more. He wants to know what we are doing to work more anti-bullying messages into our day and he will be checking in with us. As our school is part of the Peacebuilders network, he suggests using some of their materials. I’m not a huge fan of their activities, to be honest. I find them too canned for my tastes.

But this morning, as I was thinking through the launch of a project in which they are going to build a travel brochure for an imaginary land (expository writing, connections to arts, creative writing, etc.), I realized that this might be an opportunity to revamp that project. So, I did.

Now, with the revision of the Imaginary Land Project, one of the main components of their Imaginary Land is that they have to represent at least three elements of the daily Peacebuilder’s Pledge that we do every single morning as an entire school. I realize that for many of my students, they are just saying the words but understand little of the meaning anymore. I don’t blame them — repetitive speech becomes like a droning voice.

So, by breaking off the pieces of that pledge, and then having them thoughtfully work those ideas of peaceful thoughts and interactions into their projects, I am hoping to engage them in discussions around what it is they are saying every morning (in hopes of making it more meaningful) and meeting the requirements of my principal. Plus, they still get to create cool projects (they love this assignment).

Want a copy of the assignment? Here it is.

Sometimes, the shower is the best place to think ….

Peace (in the lands),
Kevin

Reflecting on Adventure Story Search Stories

There was a lot of “cool” and “check this out” in the classroom yesterday as my students used Google Search Story to create a different version of their adventure short stories. They had to put themselves in the minds of their main characters and give a flavor of their short stories with just seven (no more, no less) search engine queries.

The results were mostly interesting, I think. It’s always funny how the choosing of the music is the part they love the most. Even when we use Photostory, the same thing: they obsess over the music. Which is fine, but interesting to me.

I was thinking of the pros and cons of using Search Stories as a classroom tool.

Pros:

  • Inferential thinking is at the heart of composing and reading these kinds of stories;
  • Understanding character — from the writing standpoint, they had to imagine they were their characters — what would they be searching for?
  • It’s an easy-to-use digital story format;
  • Certainly engaging activity — my students were very focused on what they were doing;
  • YouTube as classroom outlet — we loaded up the stories into YouTube, which sparked some interesting discussions among my students about how they use YouTube at home.

Cons

  • It’s a Google site, and they have built it to generate more search traffic, thus more revenues. I made this clear as day to my students before we got to the site;
  • Having seven query slots (no more, no less) was tricky for some kids;
  • Spelling is critical because the search is built around the words;
  • Not every student is at the critical thinking stage, so some stories are stronger than others.

Here are a few of the Search Stories my students created yesterday in class.

By the way, if you are wondering, I have set up a classroom YouTube account, so they all uploaded into that account (I gave them the password and then changed it at the end of the day) which cloaks identity completely. I then made a playlist of all of their search stories, which I will share out at our class blog. Here, I made a playlist in my own Youtube account of a sampling of videos from my school account. Needless to say, I was toggling back and forth a bit with this but it is worth it.

Peace (in the search),
Kevin

Search Stories and Story Writing

My students are going to be handing in an adventure short story project today that they have been working on for about two weeks. We began with a lot of brainstorming around characters, and setting, and plot development. We’ve worked on proofreading and editing and writing dialogue in the correct format (something that never seems to have been taught in other grades, it seems to me).

Today, after they go through a self-assessment rubric, I am going to take them one step further with their characters. We’re going to be using Google Search Stories as a way to bring their characters to life a bit.

Their task: create a Search Story from the view of your main character. What would they be searching for that will tell the basic framework of the story? This has as much to do with inference (which is a theme we are working on) as it does with narrowing down a story to some basic elements. Ideally, after watching one of the Search Stories, a viewer should have some sense of the story, even if they haven’t read it. And if they have read the story, the Search Story should complement that experience.

Is that asking too much of 11 year olds?

I don’t think so, although last year when we did a Search Story project, I could clearly delineate those students whose critical thinking skills were finely developed and those who have not yet taken that step forward. The “missing elements” of the Search Story — what you leave out — is the key.

Here’s my sample from a story that I have shared with my students. The story — called The Machine — is about a brother and sister who have inadvertently constructed a robot that is now on a rampage around town, and the two siblings have to stop it by finding missing engineering plans that will tell them how to turn the robot off. Both get hurt in the process. But they are successful.

And here are the Search Stories from last year. These are not centered on a story project. They just had to create a Search Story that told a tale about something.

Peace (in the search),
Kevin

PS — I should note that I make a big deal out of the fact that this is a Google site, designed to get people to use Google for search, and that Google makes money out of every search query. I want to use the tool — it’s ease of use makes it manageable in one class period — but I also want my students to know what they are using. We all use my classroom YouTube account, by the way.