Imaginary Extinct Creatures

Wikistix Creature Collection
The parent-teacher organization at our school is very active and very supportive of the work of teachers. This comes through on many levels. One way that the PTO raises money for its work is with an annual Apple Pie Craft Fair, and each classroom is encouraged to do a small craft with their classes for “sale” at the fair. It’s really about getting our students’ parents to come to the fair and buy stuff to support the school.

Honestly, I don’t look forward to the craft fair project, and it may be because I just haven’t ever found a project that can be done in a short amount of time with connections to learning in an engaging manner for something that can be sold (mostly, to their own parents). Also, it has to inexpensive, since the PTO will only reimburse us for a nominal amount for supplies.

I’ve done:

  • rainsticks
  • calendars
  • stick figure movies
  • stained glass artwork

This year, I decided to get WikiStix and let them create imaginary creatures that have gone extinct. They liked that, and with feathers and googly eyes and glitter glue, the students had a fine creative time. Not much learning, but fun.

When I was making my own sample for them (my old friend, B Sharp, the lost note), I turned on my time-lapse stopmotion software and captured myself in the act of creation. Sort of funny to see.

Peace (in the strange things),
Kevin

My Thoughts on Veteran’s Day

veterans day 016

(photo courtesy of Gail Poulin)

Yesterday, at our school, we held a Veteran’s Day Assembly in which our school community honored Ed Boruki, a veteran of Pearl Harbor and World War II and still driving and walking around at the age of 90. One of our teachers, a veteran himself who organizes the event each year, came up with the wonderful idea of dedicating our flagpole to Mr. Boruki.

There were about three dozen veterans from the town there, most of whom were related to students at our school. They all introduced themselves to our school, one at a time.  It’s powerful to hear their voices, of where they served and in which branch of the military.  Our music teacher has written original songs for the whole school to sing called “You are the Heroes” and “We Will Remember” and there was a special luncheon for the visitors. I think our school does Veteran’s Day right.

Our staff has just three veterans, as far as I know, and I happen to be one of them. I was an infantry soldier in the Army National Guard for much of my early adulthood. So, I was asked to give a speech about what Veteran’s Day means to me.

I spent a lot of time with it, actually, trying to capture my thoughts about thanking veterans for their time served and some of my own experience in the military. I had it all printed out, and ready to go.

But we held the assembly outside on a crisp fall day. The wind was cranking, the volume on the PA system was low and the hundreds of students standing there could not be expected to pay close attention for long. So, I abandoned my script and ad-libbed the main parts of what I wanted to say. It went fine, and it was much shorter than I had originally planned as a result.

But I did record the original version as part of my writing revision process. I added some music in to it and figured I would share it out today, in honor of Veteran’s Day 2010.

Listen to the speech

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

PS — See the blog post of my colleague, Gail Poulin, for some pictures and more information about the event.

Mulling over the Future of Science Fairs and Glogster

Sixty four projects spread out across one giant cafeteria, with hundreds of students milling about. It was Science Fair for sixth graders at my school yesterday, as they shared their work around using the Scientific Method with display boards, games and even a puppet show.

This is the sixth year our science teacher has done the fair, opening up the learning to the entire school, and she and I had an interesting conversation about the Science Fair and the use of Glogster. I had mentioned that some teachers are moving towards Glogster for this kind of project. We both use Glogster for projects, and she intends to use it again this year.

We went through the pros and cons of moving the Science Fair from a physical space of sharing to a virtual space. I later added some of my own ideas as I was forming this list.

The Pros:

  • In Glogster, the projects can be archived forever.
  • The projects can be easily embedded into websites.
  • A Science Fair would never technically end.
  • Multimedia (video, audio, etc.) becomes part of the presentation tool box. For example, a podcast of an explanation of the steps of the Scientific Method could be put right into the project itself.
  • The world would become the audience; not just our school and students’ families.
  • The “writing process” on the virtual poster is a bit more malleable and forgiving (you don’t have to rip the glue and papers off to make a change). Just drag and drop and update.
  • You can now “sort” projects together under similar themes and share them out as a package of glogs. So, all of the projects that deal with Laws of Motion, or food, could be pulled together.

The Cons:

  • There would be less student collaborative work with Glogster, at least for now, as only one person can work on a single glog at a time.
  • There would be less opportunity for the face-to-face meetings that the younger students have with the sixth grade “scientists” at the fair and less opportunity for the sixth graders to “talk” through their learning to a live audience.
  • The presenter would not feel as engaged in the presentation if they were standing physically next to the project.
  • Parents can’t “save” the student work in the attic (although, they could on a flash drive, I suppose, but it’s not the same thing, is it?)
  • The idea of a school-wide even would diminish, even if you set up laptops around the space. It’s still not the same, is it?

In the end, she decided that Glogster is not yet a good fit for her vision of the Science Fair, particularly since a big part of the learning is interacting with audience and answering off-the-cuff questions from the younger students. I agreed with her.

Peace (in the thinking),
Kevin

Front Page News: My School

Norris tiger

Normally, when your school is featured on the front page of the local newspaper, you can expect the worst. But when the headline is “How a Southampton School Teaches the Meaning of Respect,” you know some good vibes are coming your way. That was the headline of our newspaper last week as a columnist with a project dealing with bullying and respect issues in our area visited our school to see what we are doing on these issues.

“As I walked through the school’s foyer, I was greeted by a hand-carved wooden sign with ‘Welcome’ in nine languages … the philosophy of this school was clear to me in minutes — development of character is as important as development of knowledge. After all, both play equal parts in who we become,” Christine Wu wrote, near the start of the article.

She then learned about our schoolwide efforts with two different social development programs — Response Classroom and Peacebuilders. While slightly different, both programs not only make students accountable, but also find ways to teach nurturing of community, and respect for everyone around them.

She ends her piece by noting that, “I’m sure that Norris school is not free of student conflict. No school is. However, they appear to be taking positive, constructive steps to address social awareness in their school.”

Yes, to both points. And I am proud to teach in a school like mine, whether we get these kind of headlines or not. There’s a lot of positive energy, and lots of great teachers, all around me every day, and the students respond to that in kind.

Peace (in peace),
Kevin

PS — you can read the entire article here at the online site of The Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Using Art to Promote Peace

GK Peaceh Poster
Each year, our fantastic art teacher conducts a project known as Peace Posters, in which students must represent the concept of peace through art. I have always loved this project because the range of work and the symbolic representation is often so creative and wonderful to see, particularly when the posters are hung all around the school.

Today, the posters are due to the art room. Yesterday, one of my students proudly showed me his poster and it really is quite detailed and intricate, showing sports all around the world. (They can’t use words — only images). I’m looking forward to seeing what others have done with their poster projects.

Peace (on the poster),
Kevin

Saving some turtles, one leaf at a time

turtle adoption nov10 (2)
I teach four classes of sixth graders and right now, two of those classes are finishing up the novel Flush by Carl Hiassen. This engaging and often-funny book centers on pollution of waters off the Florida Keys by a gambling boat and the efforts of a boy and his family to stop the pollution and protect the beach where endangered Loggerhead Turtles come to lay eggs.

We’re on a year-long inquiry around the environment, thanks in part to our participation in the Voices on the Gulf Project, and I saw an opportunity here with this book to try to do something constructive. So, we agreed that we would “adopt” a loggerhead turtle that is being cared for by the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Jones Beach, Floriday.

The catch was that my students could not just go home and ask for $2 for the turtle project. They had to earn it, and the suggestion that they came up with was raking leaves (we’re in New England and leaves are everywhere right now).

The packets of information for our turtles (each class adopted one) came in yesterday and the kids were very excited. Sure, there were some jokes about “why didn’t they ship the turtle?” But overall, I could tell they were satisfied that they had some something good for the environment with this simple turtle adoption project, and it connected perfectly with our reading of the novel and our research around turtles.

Now, I’m thinking: they might need to invent a story with our adopted turtles — Andre and Gilda — as characters. Hmmm.

Creative Writing with Invented Artifacts

This week, I intend to introduce a new book that we just bought this year: Regarding the Fountain by Kate Klise. It’s a short, fun book told with humor and in the style of using “artifacts” from the characters in the story — mostly memos, letters, and notes. I also considered Avi’s Nothing But the Truth, which is another powerful story told through emails, phone messages, etc., about a high school boy who hums along with the National Anthem, gets in trouble with his teacher and sparks a media frenzy. But, some of the language was a bit too much for my sixth graders, and the themes were more high school than elementary school. Still, it’s worth reading.

What I like about the concept of Regarding the Fountain is that I can really teach inference with my sixth graders, as you need to make connections between what is being shown and written, and what is not. And, of course, point of view is critical, too. What are characters not saying?

I am working on my own short story with artifacts, too, because when we are done with the book (it won’t take long to read), I want to have them try their hand at their own. It may be tricky and some of my young writers will be in a better place with their critical thinking skills than others. I know that I am struggling a bit with how to leave out important information so as to not give the story away too early.

Here’s what I have so far:

And if you have never heard of Regarding the Fountain, check out this glog review I did last year when I stumbled onto the book.

Peace (in the inferential thinking),
Kevin

The Value of Writing Before Parent-Teacher Conferences

We have our three days of parent-teacher conferences coming up later this week. Since I teach on a sixth grade team in an elementary school that utilizes a middle school approach (I teach Language Arts, someone else teaches math, etc., and students move through the curriculum during the day), we often have headaches trying to gather enough information for the parents that we will see (they get to choose one of us, and we relay info to them from our colleagues). It can take hours of discussions at times, in fact.

A few years ago, I showed my team how to use Google Docs, and we now save a lot of time by creating a shared resource about all of our 80 students.  The file is only for us teachers: think of it as notes for a conversation. We go in regularly and make notes about the students, so that when parent conferences come around (or report cards/progress reports), we all have some ideas of what is going on in the other classes.

As any teacher knows, sometimes the students who excel in writing are not the same who excel in math. The problem with our particular model (where we specialize in a subject area) is that we don’t always see those other strengths and other weaknesses.

This weekend, I had a stack of writing samples from our 80 sixth graders, and I began going through each student, one at a time, writing my reflections about each student so far this year — their strengths and weaknesses in reading and writing, and comments about advice I am giving them, and strategies for moving ahead. It’s time-consuming, obviously.

BUT …

The act of writing about every single one of my students really allowed me time and space to think deeply about my perceptions of each student as writers and readers here in the second month of the school year. It forced me to recall moments, conversations, classroom participation and activities, and more, and then formulate my ideas in writing. I know I write a lot more than my colleagues do, but it occurred to me that I am writing more for myself — and not just for conferences, but for teaching every day – than for them, although I expect they will find my notes useful in talks with parents.

The experienced reminded me again of the power of writing, for ourselves as much as for our students.

Peace (in the reflection),

Kevin

From Bitstrips to Glogster: A Collection of Day on Writing Webcomics

Although the National Day on Writing was Wednesday, my students were still working on their webcomics at home, on their own time, in order to finish an assignment that we had to create a celebration of writing. I really loved what they were doing, so I decided to grab some of the comics and put them on a Glog Wall as a way to mark the 2010 Day on Writing.

In thinking of use of technology, here we used Bitstrips for Schools to make the comics, a Firefox screenshot add-on to download the comics as images (I use Fireshot), Flickr to gather the comics together, and then Glogster.edu to present the comics. That’s a lot of use of tools, but what it comes down to is that the students were the ones creating content. The tools were just helpful.

Head to the National Day on Writing Webcomic Glog

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

In Praise of my Co-Teacher (Bob)

I am in the third year of some form of co-teaching, where I have teamed up with a special education teacher to collaboratively teach a Language Arts class where the student population is a mix of both those in the mainstream and those on educational plans.

The first year, the partnership felt too harried.  My co-teacher that year did her best, and I did my best, but we both agreed that it never quite clicked the way we wanted it to, mostly because we were on our own to sort it all out. Literally, we’d be doing planning when we met in the hallways between classes. She is a great teacher. Time was our problem.

Last year, our special education teacher — Bob — taught with me every day for one of our four Language Arts blocks, and although we were still finding our way, it worked. The students in that class of high needs mixed with others on education plans were engaged, and they all benefited from one-on-one attention given by the both of us (at one point, we had three of us teachers — the third was our ELL specialist).

Bob and I are at it again this year, and while there are still plenty of ways our co-teaching model could be a lot better (such as shared planning times during the day, which the administration has not been able to provide), I want to sing out the praises of my colleague, Bob, today.

  • I learn something about teaching from him just about every day. He uses more visuals for learning than I do and he comes at our reading text from different angles. He’s folksy in his approach, with humor sprinkled amidst everything he does. He’s also not afraid to admit to the students when he doesn’t know something. I try to use parts of his teaching style with my other three classes, and it works.
  • He’s a conduit between us in sixth grade and our colleagues in fifth grade. Bob is also a co-teacher in fifth grade, and so he brings ideas and strategies (and curriculum ideas) from them to us, and back again. I can’t stress enough how valuable this is. I have already seen an overall improvement in all of my new sixth grade writers because of the work done last year in fifth grade, and that is partially a result of Bob helping the fifth grade Language Arts teacher know some of the expectations of sixth grade (in a positive way) and letting me know what my fifth grade colleague is up to. We don’t get enough of that vertical communication.
  • He’s not afraid to share the stage. The two of us, Bob and I, have a good mix of personalities, I think (so, maybe he feels different … naw), and both of us willingly and often cede the floor to the other, so that class is mostly a seamless flow between two teachers. He is not an aide. He is not support staff. He is the teacher.
  • He makes time for planning and connecting. I get to my school early in the mornings. Bob is usually already there. It’s in that time we do some planning for the day and the days ahead. Even if it is only for a few minutes, this time to chat is crucial to co-teaching. Ideally, it would be a block of time during the day. (Note to self: don’t let Bob be the one who always come to your room; make sure you go to him.)
  • The core of his teaching is all about differentiated learning. Since his main focus and years of experience has been with students with learning difficulties, Bob’s style is to come at teaching from all angles, trying to hook learners of all styles. We can talk about differentiated learning all we want, but I get to see it in action with Bob, and I tuck away his ideas. He’s not afraid to try something new, and see what happens. And he’s reflective in his practice.
  • We’re revamping the focus of ELA, together. Last year, after looking over various student data, we saw some real weaknesses overall in students when it came to reading, particularly around responding to literature. So, Bob and I began the task of revamping our curriculum. We created an adaptable rubric, began modeling writing responses, and developed (and still are) lesson plans that help our students push themselves as writers. Having Bob as a partner in that has been incredibly valuable.
  • He values my ideas and teaching practices. It used to be that the students who were in pull-out special education services would be in an entirely different world. Bob (along with his colleague, Stacey) has changed that for our sixth grade. Not only does he bring ideas from the Learning Center into the mainstream classroom, but he is constantly pulling ideas from my classroom (mostly around writing and technology ) back into his smaller group Language Arts sessions. Those students don’t feel left out; they feel they are part of what we are doing in the larger classes.

I could go on.

I know I still have a lot to learn about sharing the classroom, and being open to the negotiations around learning. I hope I am doing better at that this year than I was last year. I realize, too, that it helps that Bob is a friend, and that we get along. If my co-teacher were someone that I struggled with on a personal or professional level, our system would not work, because it is built on conversations, sharing and trust. The fact that we don’t have a formal structure in place for co-teaching worries me.

So, Bob, don’t go anywhere, all right?

Peace (in the praise of a colleague),
Kevin