Spacial Prodigy

For the past two days I have been substituting in the Kindergarten classroom while the regularly-scheduled-teacher is recovering from an illness.

It has been an exciting opportunity and a return to my roots so to speak, since I first started working in schools as a kindergarten assistant.

Today something kind of blew my mind.

I started to do the plan I had - math. But after about 15 minutes the kids revolted and wanted to play Legos.

I see real value in playing with Legos. I spent a large portion of my childhood surrounded by blocks on the carpet.

Anyway, I took out a book called Planting a Rainbow. I was looking for a picture I could use as a model for them to make.

 I found my picture.

One boy finished and I asked him what it was. He told me I was looking at it all wrong.

Awesome.

I can't wait until I have this kid in my Grade 1-2 class next year.

The Problem With Collaboration

I love collaboration and I love working on a team. I believe that talking with others brings out the best in me. I feel that I am the type of person who thrives when having a sounding board.
My coworker and I are teaching summer school this summer and we are in charge of putting the program together.

No problem.

We drafted a letter to send home to the parents that included what we would be studying (ecology by using the school garden) and the questions we would be initially posing to the students (expecting that they would be coming up with their own along the way).

So my coworker sent the first draft to the headmaster who sent it around to some other leaders in the school.

One thing I learned when I first started teaching was that if you put ten teachers in a room, you would get ten different opinions about the way things should go. That seems to be the way it is and has been rare in my young career that two teachers have the same outlook.

So we sent this draft around and as of now a week later, it has undergone six or seven revisions with each revision being tweaked and having clip art added.

Wouldn't this process be more efficient if we were all in a room together working on this? Maybe making a Google Doc would be good so we could all edit it at the same time. Maybe we could be given an hour to make all the edits we wanted and at the end of the hour we would have to finish.

I guess my main problem with this is that if we are not trusted to do this, would this be better left in the hands of those who are trusted?

How is it possible to streamline collaboration? How can I make this problem work out more smoothly?

Parent Signature

The Grade 1-2 teacher at my school has her students take home one paper book and read it with their parents. The parents are supposed to sign it, and as an incentive, the students get a point when they bring it back signed.

Apparently this parent's name is "bab" and signed it, "good job man!"

A New Post

Many teachers have probably changed grades at some point in their careers, but next year will be my first time.

I started my teaching career as a Grade 3-4 homeroom teacher, and I have spent the last four years teaching Grades 3 and 4. Next year I am moving to Grades 1-2.

I am extremely excited to move into the lower grades. I am nervous at the same time.

I found out I am moving last Wednesday and I have already been thinking about what I want to do next year, what the room will look like, and what materials I want to use.

I just wish I had more time to think about this now, but I still have two more units left this year! Thinking about next year will have to be a summer project.

The Scale of the Universe

This is a link to a website where you can move a slider and virtually move through space.

http://htwins.net/scale2/

I found this and I initially shared it with our Grade 5-6 teacher since they have a unit on space. He showed it to his class and they went wild over it.

After I heard that, I showed it to my class as well. They loved it. After letting them play on it for 15 minutes or so, I started asking them questions like:

• What is the most interesting thing on here for you?
• What is bigger, x or y?
• How many x's can you fit into one y?
• If the Saturn V rocket is about the size of a football field, how long would it take you to run the length of it?

Another great feature of this site is that you can click on the objects and a fact bubble will pop up with more information.

I am going to have a think about this to see how many more ways I can use this. I am sure I can think of some big questions to use with this site.

Studying Through A Different Activity

Working with nonnative English speakers has me constantly thinking of how they can learn more effectively.

Something I have done in my Japanese studies is to start playing sports: I first played soccer last fall and I am now taking tennis lessons. I first got this idea from a friend of mine who told me, on the first day I was in Japan back in 2003, that he took Korean lessons for a while. I asked how it was, and he replied that he was learning more Japanese than Korean.

Unfortunately most of our student population are Japanese, and here in Sendai, there are not many opportunities for them to participate in an activity that is taught in English.

Still, our students have the opportunity to join our After School Activities program as well as Summer School. This year in summer school we are doing a unit on Gardening and outside. (We don't have a title for it yet.) We are going to get the kids out of the classroom and have them doing hands-on activities.

Since the school is going to try to get kids who do not come to our school to come this year, it will be interesting to see how they react to this kind of instruction. I think they will love it.

A Thank You

As a student council advisor, I have an opportunity to be involved in some great projects. When the students said they wanted to have an event to remember the one year anniversary of the earthquake, I thought it was a great idea. I also thought it would be a good time to thank the people from around the world who donated money and supplies to us after the earthquake.

When I first thought of this, I thought I would take all the pictures. I even had an idea of what they would look like (the first picture in the movie). After taking several pictures for the video, I realized I did not have the necessary time to go around the school taking pictures. So, I handed the project off to the students and this is what they came up with.



They did an awesome job.

The Scientific Method

When I saw a Lego space shuttle being sent into the upper atmosphere, I thought it was really cool. I like to share interesting findings with my students since it gets them excited and it gets their imaginations running.
Today I decided to show the clip of the Lego ship going to space to my students. Before we watched it though, I asked them if they remembered The Scientific Method (They did) and I asked them if they remembered the experiment we did in class (They remembered that too).

Then I told them that we were going to watch something, and I was going to ask them a question after the video was done.

When the video was finished, I reviewed The Scientific Method, and I told them if what we just saw was the experiment, what would the question have been. I gave them the example of the experiment we did in class and worked backwards.

There were three girls who did not understand right away and I had to take them aside and explain it to them further. All in all though, their answers were interesting:

• How can we fly the balloon up high without a human going with it?
• How can we make a balloon fly high while holding things?
• Can the Lego plane fly?
• How high can you go with a balloon?
• How can you see space without going there?
• How far [high] can the airplane go?
• How far did the balloon go?
• Can a balloon go out of the atmosphere?
• How far can the plane fly?
• どこまで飛んでいたんですか？ [How far did the airplane fly?]
• Why did you throw the things?
• Are we looking at space now?
• How can you trick people with the picture?

Looking at these questions, I can see there are definitely a few who did not understand what I was asking even though they thought they did.
I think it is interesting that one student thought the video was fake. He said he thought it was because he could see the strings. The student did not understand what the strings were for.

I like to ask my students these kinds of abstract questions to get them to think in multiple directions.

The Scale of the Universe

http://htwins.net/scale2/

Google Docs

I started using Google Docs back when it first came out in 2007. I also jumped on the Google Sites bandwagon and created several sites using it. Back then, I quickly ran into its limitations and I stopped using it.
Then this year a coworker of mine turned me back onto Google Docs. He uses it with his students in various ways, but since I started using it in class, the major benefits I see are:

1. If you make the document and share it with your students, they cannot delete it.
2. You can see when the students work on their documents.
3. You can work with them in real time.
4. The students can work on their writing at home. (Bonus)

In addition to using it in my class, I have also begun using it for myself. And since I started, I cannot stop.

Personal Uses
When I first started using Google Docs way back when it came out, the first thing I did was put my resume up on it. And one of the first things I did this year was to put my resume up onto it. I really like that I can embed the document into a webpage, and it updates as I update it. It is also nice to know that an updated version of my resume is always available whenever there is an internet connection. You never know.

I also use Google Docs to keep track of student grades. I do a lot of grading at home, and before I had to email myself the numbers or file and then resave it onto the server at school. Half the time I try that way, there is a problem with saving it and I have to go to my workaround of first saving it to the desktop and then saving it to the server. Needless to say, I can save a lot of time there by using Google Docs.

In addition to grades, I use Google Docs to maintain records and forms I sometimes need to access from both home and school. Last month I had to complete certificates for our elementary assembly. I try to rotate the students around so they all can have a chance at some glory, but when I sat down to
write them out, I had to wait until I got to school so I would not double up the students.

I also share documents and forms with my students. I can embed the documents I want the students to read on our class blog.


Things I Want to Try
There are several ideas I have that I still have not tried yet. We just started using the DRA reading assessment at our school to track students' reading progress and better target the skills they need to work on. I think using Google Docs to chart the students would be a good way to keep all teachers "in-the-know" about the students' reading progress.

In much the same way I envision the school to use Google Docs for our DRA charts, I also think that we should be using Google Docs to keep behavioral charts. I recently had a conversation at school about a student who was having problems, and one of the teachers involved in the process had no idea what I was talking about. If we had more and easier collaboration in these matters, everyone would have known what was going on.

I would also like to try doing unit plans using Google Docs. I find that the access to documents on Google is much easier than digging through our school server. Easier access means more updates to the plans.


Of course many of the problems I mentioned above can be solved in ways other than using Google Docs, but these are some things that I think could be solved at my school.

Action and Outcome Graphic Organizer

I have a student ... make that two students ... who are in fourth grade and love Percy Jackson books. They love them. It must be because they both have older brothers who like and have read them as well.

When I saw one of the students reading the fourth book in the series yesterday, I went online to find a discussion guide since I have not read them.

One discussion guide I found mentioned that young readers should use a cause and effect graphic organizer while they read to keep track of major events.

I was not satisfied with the graphic organizers I found through. I felt that along with the cause and effect, there should be another two columns.

My organizer has:
Character - This is where the student writes the character's name who makes an action.
Problem - This is the problem the character had to face.
Character's Action - This is for the details of the character's action.
Outcome - Here, the outcome of the event can be written.

I am going to have to make a small Percey Jackson reading group and try this out.

(No longer available. Time to make a new one.)