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| The view this morning from the front porch. |
I left my flashdrive upstairs, which is equivalent to leaving it at school as far as I'm concerned, so working on the school's newsletter is obviously out of the question. I celebrated today, as I do all snowdays, with cosmopolitans, my favorite go-to adult beverage. At this point, I am kinda hopeful that tomorrow will be a snowday, as well.
School has been going pretty well lately. I'm still totally burned out on the 6-day specials rotation, but at least I've been doing fun stuff with the kids. Fourth grade has been working on atlases and this rotation is playing some fun online map games (from National Geographic) that they are enjoying. I am making the groups that did not make good progress on the atlas activities finish before getting to the computers. I should've announced that at the start!!
Third grade is mired in their Famous American biographies. I enjoy it, and it is pretty self-directed, but there are a few kids in each class who are just so dependent on someone pointing out every single answer to them that it just saps my energy. At last I have I&E time at the end of the day to work with them in very small groups. But it's so hard to get around to 25 kids during a 35 minutes period. I can barely touch base with all of them, let alone follow up with them.
Second graders are working on their Ancient China research, and yesterday had a visit from the CRRL librarians for Chinese folktale storytelling. The librarians did a great job, and the kids' reactions were just priceless. My favorite librarian tells The Seven Chinese Sisters in such a funny way--the kids still talk about it a year later.
We've been enjoying the Anansi tales in first grade and kindergarten. I kind of wish the Eric Kimmel versions had a little more, um, Africa, in them. I wasn't in the loop when they were published, and I'd have to do some serious digging into the reviews back when the books came out, but why isn't Anansi a little more African? We have enjoyed the stories, but they certainly don't look like they're part of our Black History Month recognition. (And I know it's March...it takes a while to get through the rotations!!)
Fifth grade has been my favorite class this rotation. For the past several weeks, we've been learning effective online searching techniques. I've long avoided teaching the kids about Google searching, but I finally came to the realization that they're all doing it outside of school, so I should at least help them do it a little more skillfully. It's been a good unit. We got to the point where we were evaluating websites' validity, and I tricked them for a minute with the Endangered Northwest Tree Octopus website. Well, maybe more than a minute. Our plan was to analyze other websites the next rotation to try to determine their validity. But then I got them this past week. Instead of viewing websites, I told them that their teachers had requested we do a little review of explorers for our upcoming SOL tests. So I hand them a 1/2 sheet of paper and directions for getting some facts about the explorers they'd studied this year. Little did they know that I'd set them up with the spoof website All About Explorers! Ooh, I got them so good!!!! They totally fell for it, until a few groups started reading a little more in-depth and discovering the inaccuracies in the explorers' biographies. Such fun!!! I had to make them promise not to tell the other classes of fifth graders, and it worked!! Are fifth graders that gullible, or do they just trust their teachers so much?! I had one student who was hurt that I would trick him like I did. I tried to explain that the Internet tricked him!! Next rotation, we're starting Media Literacy, which is a most fun unit to teach, too. Happy times in fifth grade!
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