My Digital Journey

Writing Progress!

I've been working closely with one of the students in my kindergarten class who has been really struggling in writing. As of February he was still writing random words, using random letters, and sticking to simple sentence frames he's used to like "I see..." that often make little sense.
The first picture is an example of his writing monthly assessment from the month of February where the students are pushed to write more than they might on their own in their journals. The writing below is written by me to have a transcript of what he is trying to write. He also had a lot of trouble even remembering what he was trying to write, and would make it up.
Over the last few months I have been spending time with him during writing, and I noticed that he loves to tell stories and talk (even when not supposed to :)). Often he would also want to tell me about the picture with his writing in great detail. I started sitting with him during writing and having him tell me a story. He would get very into it, giving great detail and acting out parts. As he did this I would help him break down the parts and write one short sentence at a time about what he was telling me. This seemed to start really working, and he was finally showing interest and enjoyment during writing. He was able to and excited to write as much as possible every single time, even starting to go onto the second page and write about things besides just zombies (his favorite topic).
The second and third picture are from his recent April assessment and there is noticeable difference. I was still helping him some with the process, but he was doing much more of it on his own and taking charge of what to write.
Yesterday, as I was working on pulling students during the writing time I wasn't able to work with him on the journal. When I pulled him, he was so excited to tell me all about what he was writing in his journal, how he was already to the second page, and he did it all by himself. As soon as I was done he ran over to me to show me what he had written, and is determined to start filling both the first and second pages of writing.
I'm so excited to see how much his writing is advancing and how excited he is becoming about his writing so far into the year because of the work we have been doing together. (and this isn't only because it has some connections to my action research and reaffirming the idea I'm exploring - the importance of the connection between oral and written language!) I can't wait to see how much more he does during the last 6.5 weeks! :)

What Adults Can Learn From Kids

Watched this very inspiring and thought provoking TED talk, given by a "kid" herself on the value of listening to and trusting children. I think it is vital that every educator (and adult for that matter) hear what she has to say on the need for more reciprocity in the adult-child and especially teacher-student relationship. It would also be a great resource for students who are older who can use the ideas in the video to start a conversation where they have the opportunity to create a community where all can benefit, be trusted, share in the creation of rules and class structure, express their ideas and opinions, and feel valued. Adora Svitak makes some very good points throughout her presentation starting with the connotations behind the word "childish". She makes the connection between using that term as an admonishment for those acting irrational or irresponsible. However, as she points out, there are a great deal of examples of adults acting irrational and irresponsible and many children who have inspired others, created wonderful things, and done great work for their community and even the world. She explains that it is in a way unfair for this "age-discriminatory" word to be used to describe those actions and behaviors which go beyond the age of a person.
Then again, she moves onto the point that not all "childish" behaviors are as awful as they are made out to be. Yes, irrational thinking may not be useful much of the time, but there are many situations where it can actually be beneficial. Children still have the ability to think beyond reality and ignore the reasons why something shouldn't or couldn't make sense. By the time most people are adults they are "burdened" by what they have learned and so are more hesitant to take chances and embrace their imagination without holding back because of perceived limitations.
As teachers, this is important to keep in mind. We should take the time to listen to the ideas that out students have and to develop and nurture the creativity and innovation that comes with it. Taking the time to listen to our student can make all the difference.

Earth Day

Today we celebrated Earth Day at our school. I was really excited because I think it's important to share these ideas with children at an early age, and even more importantly because I got to read them one of my favorite books ever, The Lorax, and wear my Lorax tree hugger shirt.

We started off after lunch by just talking about Earth Day-what it is, what it means, why we celebrate it. I was pleasantly surprised by all the information that the students already knew about Earth day, protecting the earth and our environment, and why it is important. They understood that we were wearing green and blue because it represents the plants and water which are important things to keep clean and safe because we need them. This was really good because we've been learning about plants, what plants need to live and how people use plants so they had a lot of background to connect to. Most importantly we need to "keep our earth pretty and clean!"

We did a little comparison of earth and our houses because we all live on the earth so it's like one gigantic house. The students were sharing what they thought about a house that had trash all over the floor, "yucky stuff" in the water and air (they didn't like the idea of showering or taking baths even more than they normally do), and other problems that are happening to the earth. It was so funny to see how excited and grossed out they got by all of this, and that a lot of the really got the connection between a house we live in and the earth as a really big version of that.

We read the book The Lorax together, and though many of them have seen the new movie, they didn't know the original book. As I was reading we spent a lot of time stopping to talk about what was happening, how the environment was changing in the pictures and the descriptions, why it was changing, what that meant, and more. It had such great visuals of how the same piece of land looked before the Once-ler arrived and the slow transition to dark and gray and dirty after he had made his factory. They were so engrossed in the story even though it took a much longer time to read than normally holds their attention. At times the students were so excited about wanting to make a comment about something in the story or a connection to Earth day and the story they looked as if they would explode. We also spent some time talking about the Once-ler, how he was treating the animals, the Lorax, the trees, and the land around him. We focused so much on what the Once-ler did, how it affected the land, air, and water, and how that affected the animals so they could see the connections. I was surprised by how well they were able to understand what was happening and that they were so disgusted by what was going on, they were yelling at the Once-ler and saying how he was so bad and they don't like him. 

After we talked about why we read the Lorax for Earth day. The students came up with great connections and understood that it's important to keep the earth clean, to plant plants, to not litter, etc. They even started comparing what was happening in the book to our own earth unprompted, saying that it's like when we leave trash on the ground it's bad for the earth and the animals might eat it and die! (They all got very into the birds dying thing and kept coming up with ways to help the earth so that our birds don't die and "real" stories of when they saw birds eat trash on the ground and die or the bird flew into dirty air and died- hey, at least they're concerned about the birds and see a connection between actions of people and the effect on animals!)

We finished by talking about what the Lorax would want us to do or not want to do, like he would not want us to litter, make the earth messy. He would want us to pick up trash, plant new plants, and take care of our earth. I asked them if they wanted to help our earth just like the Lorax and they were SO excited to go outside and pick up the trash from our playground. I was a little worried because I figured they were just excited to go out and play (even though that wasn't the point) but not a single one of them was playing on the playground or running around. They were all almost fighting over the pieces of trash to collect as many as they could. They all wanted to show off how much they picked up and didn't want to come in when the day was over because "there's still trash to clean up!" They were also frustrated when they looked outside of our playground area at the front of the school or other playground and couldn't go there to get the trash. A few of them even asked if we could do this every single day!

We came in and talked about how we want to be like the Lorax and protect our earth, so their job was go home and talk to family and friends about what they do to help our earth so the next day we can come up with some ideas to help the Lorax even more the next day.

Will post pics of their Lorax craft where they are drawing/writing about how to save the earth and share some of the ideas we came up with!

Addressing Tragedy in Schools

The recent tragedy that took place in Boston has brought me back to thinking, not for the first time this year unfortunately, how to deal with devastating events happening in the world with your students. This time I am in a kindergarten classroom, and it doesn't seem that any of my students are aware that anything has happened and we have not talked about it in class at all. They do appear to have some knowledge of bad things that have happened in the world though. When we had a lockdown drill back in February and had to hide in the bathroom to wait for the police to come let us out we had a short conversation about it to prepare them and give the reassurances that it is just a drill to practice keeping them safe. While we were talking we tried to avoid any mention of situations that would lead to a lockdown other than if a bad guy came to our school. However a few of the students did bring up things that might happen like if a person had a gun or wanted to hurt them, though they didn't really seem to understand what it meant or make any connection to it. I think at the age of 5 or 6 the students have a hard time processing these events or things that don't happen directly to them. Especially as they are just starting to venture out into the world and begin school I don't know if it is a good idea to overexpose them to these tragedies and scare them, and parents are more likely to want a say in how aware or not their students are kept of these things.

However, I think back to last semester when I was student teaching in a 5th grade classroom when the school shooting at Sandy Hook happened. I was actually teaching in the classroom as it was happening and did not find out until lunch time. We chose not to talk to the students about it after lunch since, being a minimum day, there was not much time to have a conversation and we thought it best to give students the opportunity to talk with their parents first. The following Monday we had a short staff meeting before school, but we talked more about how to make our school more safe and address concerns in that area than how or if to talk to our students about it. We still did not initiate a discussion about Sandy Hook with our students, it seemed like most teachers, including my master teacher, took the stance of allowing conversation about it from the students if they brought it up, but to initiating the conversation ourselves. It did end up coming up later as we started a previously planned activity where students were making wishing trees for the holidays. The idea was that students were to write a wish for the holidays beyond just what they wanted for presents, but to send good thoughts and positive energy out into the world, and then tie these messages around the school. Many of the students suggested writing wishes for the people of Sandy Hook to help them heal and deal with what had happened. It was so great to see the students being aware and compassionate about what had happened, and it felt more natural and appropriate that they were the ones who brought it up and led the conversation.

I do still wonder what the best approach (if there is one) might be as teachers to dealing with these national tragedies which are unfortunately a part of our lives. It does not seem as if there is one definite answer, and that so much of this depends on the students' ages, awareness, trust in the classroom and with there teacher, the comfort level of all involved, and more. My hope is that in my own teaching career there are not too many instances in which I will have to figure this out.


Here is a link to an article on sharemylesson.com (also a good resource on its own for teachers) about helping children to cope with these events, along with a number of other links on related topics which I found to be interesting and useful- http://www.sharemylesson.com/article.aspx?storyCode=50007527

Seth Godin's Tribes reactions by EDUC 578

Created a storify page as a reflection of the Seth Godin book, Tribes. As a class we each listened to the audiobook and tweeted quotes which stood out to us. This is a compilation of some of the quotes by my peers along with a video of Seth Godin himself talking about this idea of tribes that he presents.

Visitors vs Residents

After learning about the idea of being an Internet visitor as opposed to resident, I think that personally I fall somewhere in between the two, honestly probably more so on the visitor side. I have had a Facebook for years and a MySpace before that, but even with those I am not very interested in creating a projection of my identity online. I rarely post status updates, check ins, or photos (though I'm occasionally tagged by others) and consider Facebook to be more of a way to keep in touch with people from high school, distant family, or other groups of people with whom I wouldn't necessarily call or text with personal or group messaging or seeing people's updates on the newsfeed. I did have a twitter before this course but it was really just because my dad wanted me to help him figure it out so he could use it for work, and I had never tweeted anything or followed anything before. I've also never had a blog, I don't honestly like the idea of posting my thoughts or personal things on the Internet too much and never really felt the need, though I do like to look at other's blogs that I come across if they are interesting. I do love to use the Internet and computer tools like the apps offered on the iPad. I use google and Pinterest constantly every day to get new ideas for all different areas of life. I also do a lot of research on the Internet for educational purposes and just for life or interest. I do think that the Internet is a great tool that should be used by teachers and their students in and out of the classroom to enhance learning among other things. I also think it is a great way to get ideas from other teachers for lesson ideas or activities, etc.
I don't see my relationship with the Internet changing too much in the future because I do not really like the idea of creating, managing, and developing too much of an identity online. I do think there would be some value in creating a classroom blog as a teacher to update parents on what is going in in the classroom in a more accessible way, and that students could log onto to interact with or share with others what their class is like. For me though, the Internet definitely is more of a tool that I think can be very useful in some ways, though I hesitate at the idea of becoming more of a resident.