Being Persuasive

While working on persuasive writing this week, my student teacher and I had our students come up with a topic and develop a paragraph on that idea. Yesterday, my students published their writing at our class blog. And those that were able to finish early then went onto our ToonDooSpaces site and began creating a webcomic around the topic of their paragraph.

Here are a few pieces of writing that I thought were interesting:

I don’t think schools should make their students wear uniforms. The reasons why I think that are because students should be able to wear what they want, not what teachers make them wear. Another reason is because kids like to express themselves through their clothes that they wear and they can’t do that when they are forced to wear uniforms that look the exactly the same as everybody else. Also uniforms are ugly! They are colorless, patternless, and you look like your going to work every single day because some uniforms have ties. Some schools make their students wear uniforms because you can tell your students apart from other schools on field trips, but many times there are other schools that have uniforms which can mix students up with them. Some uniforms might not be comfortable, distracting students from their school work, and they can take creativity away from students, because their wardrobe for school is all the same. Those are just some of the reason why I don’t think schools should have uniforms.

In my opinion, electronic devices should be allowed in school. They are capable of helping the students learn new things. Students will get more involved by using electronics. The devices can promote education for the students. The students can learn from using electronic devices for educational purposes. Another reason would be that electronics save money. Paper, books, and other school supplies will not be wasted when electronics are at hand. Teachers will not need school supplies if their school provides electronics. I believe students will be more involved if using an electronic. They will pay more attention to their studies because of the device they are using. Students are interested in using these devices, so it would help to have electronics in the classroom. Also, teachers and students will be able to communicate with electronic devices by email and other programs. Students will be able to ask questions and learn more from their teachers. The students would also learn responsibility. When they handle electronics, they learn about how to take care and use them, too. The students would learn about technology, along with responsibility. They will be using complex devices and learning about the different applications on them. Electronics are easy to handle and they work efficiently. They are lighter than books and won’t be as hard to carry for the students. Students will get to explore with electronics. They can search information needed for their academic study. Many schools should consider purchasing electronics for their students to enhance their education. Electronic devices can broaden a student’s imagination and create a better environment for the school.

Field trips are an important part of school life. My 1st reason is field trips teach
students about the outside world. If they learn about their community, they might want to get involved in helping the town. My second cause is students need a break from school tests. Maybe plan tests a day before a field trip so that the students have something to look forward to. A third reason why we should have field trips is that sometimes kids learn better by doing hands-on activities rather than taking notes. And because of that, students would do better on quizzes and tests. A last support is that the students might want to do their work. If a field trip is coming up, you might have to get a certain score on a quiz to go. That’s why field trips are so important.

Do you know of any child who really enjoys homework? Like I thought, no. Well, kids shouldn’t have homework for multiple reasons. Reason one, is that kids have six hours of school, which means six hours of work. When kids get home from a hard day of schoolwork, the last thing they want to do is homework. The second reason why kids shouldn’t have homework is because homework wastes children free time, such as spending time with the family. If kids are doing homework, they will not spend quality time playing with their siblings or spending time with their family. In addition, kids lose exercising time, like playing outside, because of homework, thus making them not as healthy. A fourth reason children shouldn’t have homework is because homework can make kids stressed. An example is, the child has a really long and hard math packet that is due the next day. Struggling on it and staying up late can make the child stressed about the deadline and the difficulty level, and the child will be deprived of sleep. Which leads into my next point. Homework can make a child tired because of the reasoning in my last point. In conclusion, children should not have to deal with a type of schoolwork, after school ends.

( By the way, I am writing this for homework.)

We’re going to try to encourage some of the kids to submit their pieces to our local newspaper, which often runs short editorials by young people. What we are hoping for are multiple ways for our young writers to see themselves as published writers — from the blog to the newspaper.

Peace (in the writing),
Kevin

The Super-Duper-Alley-Ooper-Zooper-Gooper Play

My student teacher is teaching a unit on paragraph writing and we introduced a writing prompt the other day in which our students had to design and then explain a play in our game of Quidditch (see the tutorial video for more info). We are working on strong topic and closing sentences, and use of transition words. We also had them diagram out their play (which reminded me of a video from fellow National Writing Project friend Bee Foster around the literacy of a football play)

It was a blast to hear some of their ideas and talk about engaged in writing … they were intent and purposeful, for sure. I also wrote and designed a play with them. My play is the Super-Duper-Alley-Ooper-Zooper-Gooper Play (and I made them say it with three times fast), and like theirs, it requires some background knowledge of how we play our game of Quidditch. But you’ll get the idea.

If your Quidditch team really wants to score with style, then you need to learn the Super-Duper-Alley-Ooper-Zooper-Gooper play. First, the seeker, beater and chasers have to work together as a team. This play begins after your seeker catches a snitch. Second, when the opponent seeker sets up to make their own catch on the next possession, your beater should be ready to knock them out of the game for five seconds. Meanwhile, one designated chaser should be moving near your team’s seeker, who catches the snitch away from the opposing team. The beater now moves along with your chaser, who sets up to catch the quaffle pass from a teammate. Finally, the beater knocks out any defenders as the chaser scores a goal by hitting the high corner — scoring three points in a matter of seconds. Repeat this play as often as necessary and your team is sure to emerge as victors at the Quidditch Championship.

Peace (on the Quidditch field),
Kevin

Highlights from the Concert for Change

I finally got time to make a highlight video of last week’s Concert for Change at our school, where we had student and staff musicians put on a live concert to raise coins/money for Pennies for Peace and donated books for schools down in New Orleans. I showed the highlights to my students yesterday, and they loved it (particularly my drummer student, who helped come up with the concert idea and helped organize the event with me). If you make it to the very end, you can see the stage full of students singing the Three Cups of Tea song as a finale.

That’s me, by the way, playing guitar in the first few acts and then bass near the end of the night.

Peace (in the music),
Kevin

So, you want to play Quidditch?

Yesterday, the day before our February break, we gathered all of the the sixth graders together to begin discussing Quidditch season at our school. Yes, we play Quidditch and it is both exciting (all paths lead to a sixth grade tournament in April) and frustrating (all brains seem to fixate on the tournament). The key for us teachers is to use the excitement for learning, and we do all sorts of art, writing, math and other curricular activities.

So, what is our game of Quidditch? Glad you asked. Last year, I created this video that shows the way we play our game.  And I wrote a song about Quidditch, too, called The Q Rap.

Take a listen to the song.

Take a look at the video.

Peace (on the field),
Kevin

Constructing Bridge Glogs

My science teacher colleague was so jazzed up about how our students used Glogster for our Three Cups of Tea project that she asked that I show her how it worked. That took about, oh, five minutes, and she was off, crafting an assignment for her Bridge Engineering Unit for our students. They had to choose a style of bridge and create a glog resource about it. She was impressed, the kids were engaged, and it laid a great foundation for their toothpick bridge construction venture now underway.

Check out a few of the Bridge Glogs:

Peace (on the virtual poster),
Kevin

More invented words from students

This is Part 2 of a post about new words that were invented by my students as part of our unit on the Origins of Words (read part one from yesterday). Here are a few more words that tickled my fancy.

MicMonic (2010) – A disease that makes you sing really loud in the shower. Listen to the word

Nur (2010) – The act of running reverse while looking forward. Listen to the word

Shnooble (2010) -A bear with a bat’s wings and a mermaid tail. Listen to the word

Sqig (2010) – A cross of a squirrel and a pig. Listen to the word

Umbrelephant (2010) -A noisy umbrella. Listen to the word

Xclven (2010) 🙁ex-cla-ven) Confused and angry at the same time. Listen to the w

Zingeringding (2010) – Hitting metal to metal. Listen to the word.

Peace (in the playfulness of language),
Kevin

Some new crazy words

We’re just ending our unit on the Origins of the English Language, with discussions ranging from Shakespeare (we talked about Hamlet being the foundation for The Lion King and used Shakespearean insults) to the guillotine (an eponym word that catches the attention of the boys,  at least) to examining the prefix-root-suffix nature of most words (they didn’t know that ET the movie and creature was really short for extra-terr-atrial) and inventing new words. We use Frindle as a way into the fun of inventing words (I read aloud sections to them).

We use a wiki to create an online dictionary each year but it goes beyond that (I wrote about this project recently for the Choice Literacy online magazine). Each year, since 2005, my students add one new invented word to an ever-growing wiki dictionary that now has about 400 invented words. Some students today are collaborating with their siblings and friends from years ago. It’s pretty neat and the wiki is the perfect platform for this work, too.

Here are a few words from this year that I found interesting:

Alphapet (2010) – A pet that knows how to spell. Listen to the word

Bannacofalota (2010) – A cold you get from eating to many bananas and drinking to much coffee. Listen to the word

Canacoca (2010) – A candy that tastes like anything you want. Listen to the word

Erming (2010): When you step on the back of someone’s heel. Listen to the word

Floopy (2010)- The act of feeling off balanced, and crazy. Listen to the word

Gorf (2010) -When a frog barks. Listen to the word

Hiccsnbow (2010) –The act of sneezing,burping, hiccuping and throwing up at the same time. Listen to the word

Lofx (2010) – A ball that never stops bouncing. Listen to the word

I’ll share out some more tomorrow and I may Twitter-blast some invented words today.

Peace (in the invention),
Kevin

How to Collect Glogs Together

Now that most of our Three Cups of Tea glogs are done (a few still need more work by the students to clean them up with proofreading), I decided to create a space where they could all be collected together for viewing by the world (and parents and family). I know a number of people are using wikis for embedding glogs, but I decided to try out Yola.com — which allows you to construct five free websites and it is built on using widgets.

If you are wondering about this process of creating a website for these kinds of projects, here are some brief steps:

  • I registered at Yola.com (actually, I already have an account there because I have used it for other projects.) I followed the steps there to create a website, chose a theme and was ready to begin building my site in a few minutes.
  • I went over to my “classroom” at the edu-glog site andwent through the glogs that were ready to be brought from the “private” setting to the “public” setting. Only a teacher can do this step.
  • I then found the “embed into page” link below the glog, grabbed the code and went back to my Yola site. There, I inserted an html widget, and copied the embed code.
  • Now, here is where I fiddled a bit. For some reason, the embed code is always too large, so I tinkered with the settings in the html  code — I reduced the percentage to 70 and then adjusted the width and length accordingly. You need to do all three for it work right. I wish there were more embed options on the glogster side of the world.
  • Once that is done, you can save and check your work. If it seems OK, then go through the process again. And again. I stacked a handful of glogs per page on the Yola site and divided up my four classes into parts so that there were not too many glogs on one page.

If my description doesn’t help, you can also view this video tutorial someone made about embedding a glog into a Google Site website, which is pretty close to using Yola.


But please take a few minutes to check out the glogs of my students — I am pretty impressed with what they were able to accomplish.

http://norris3cups.yolasite.com/

Peace (in the sharing of tea),
Kevin

Another fine Glog Project

I am working on building a Yola website for all of my students’ Three Cups of Tea online posters, via Glogster. Some are just so well-done and interesting that I feel that I might be sharing here now and then. I gave them some final time yesterday to complete their work and all of the projects are now graded and most are ready for publishing.

One thing I did like about the closed glog network is that I could message the students directly, note any spelling errors or content omissions or general comments, and then they could work right from the site to edit their projects.

Here is an examplar project, in my mind. The design works for the project, their audio was a nice touch, the video complemented their work and they were thoughtful in their answers.

Peace (on the poster),
Kevin