Diagramming Sports Plays as Visual/Information Literacy

The writing prompt I had for my students yesterday tapped into their energy and enthusiasm around our game of Quidditch. They had to design, diagram, name and then explain in writing a “secret” play for their team. I’ve done versions of this prompt before, but this year, I had on the back of my mind […]

Slice of Life: I am Mr. Snow

We’re just under a week from our annual Quidditch Tournament and the artwork frenzy has taken hold. We are working on huge banner posters for our team (Permafrost) and every student is hard at work, finishing up their T-Shirt art projects. Yesterday, I realized that my own T-Shirt was still an empty canvas, so I […]

Usernames, Passwords and … me

I designed an activity the other day as part of our Digital Life unit that centered on passwords. We watched the Common Craft video about secure passwords (which was a hit as was the one about protecting reputations online) and used a site called How Secure is My Password, and then, the task before my […]

The Science Essay: What They’re Writing About

We often “write into the day” to get our thoughts together. Yesterday, I had my students write an overview of the topic that will be the heart of their Environmental Science/Persuasive Essay project now slowly getting underway. (See some of the various topics they have chosen to write about in the Wordle above). They had […]

Slice of Life: Atomic Blur

(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers) Yesterday, we spent about an hour beginning our class discussions about our game of Quidditch (which we play at our school every year). The choosing of a team name can be tricky, but like most everything with my class this year, […]

Wordling Our Way into Day One

I am always curious to know what my new sixth graders are looking forward to and what they worry about. I had them use a Google Survey to gather responses to those two questions and used their answers to generate a few Wordles. Can you tell which is which? Hint: MCAS is our state standardized […]

When Students Make Search Stories

The other day, I wrote about the Google Search Story Creator, which is a pretty nifty digital story generator that creates short videos based on queries that you put into Google (and, the site is yet another reason for us to use Google, meaning more eyeballs on their advertisements). Yesterday, as we wound down the […]

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 […]

Slice of Life: Dry Ice, baby!

(This is part of the Slice of Life project at Two Writing Teachers) I am so proud of my class. This week, they did the difficult task of choosing a name for our Quidditch team (We play a version of Quidditch at our school in which all sixth grades compete against each other on a […]