Mr Hammerlund

Since winter break I have struggled to post to my blog. The words did not flow from me and felt forced; as a result blogging and ultimately reflecting felt like a chore. I think that I was simply out of practice. As I allowed other tasks to fill the time I had been using to reflect, I fell more and more out of my rhythm and each subsequent post became less and less frequent. The downward spiral had begun. I was still really good at coming up with ideas to blog about and I saved them as a draft post. Right now I have 45 ready to be completed. I hope I can remember what I wanted to say. When the new school year starts in August and I find out what my schedule is, the first thing I am going to do is to take one period a week and block it off. I am going to use that period for reflection and writing.

After moving from teaching grades 3-4 to grades 1-2 this year, I was unsure of what the students would be able to do. I got into the classroom and I felt a little uneasy. I felt off balance. I put on the kid gloves and began the year. We used a lot of paper. We painted. We cut. We did things you would expect a [1995] lower elementary class to do. Sure, we went to the computer lab, but I was not pushing them to explore technology. Then I signed up for COETAIL  and to complete my assignments I had to push my students into areas I did not think they were ready for. We dove into using Google Apps, I had them logging into different accounts, researching, finding answers to their own questions, finding answers to my questions, and learning new ways to express ourselves. Photo Credit:  mariandy_gizfel   via   Compfight   cc I thought about how far my class has come this year today when one of my students asked me what roly polys eat. (A roly ...

We learned a lot this year. We learned we could have fun with a group of more than two, We discovered a new sense of independence, We found our voice and learned to communicate what we thought, We learned that doing hard things can be fun, We found new ways to connect and new ways to find information, We surprised our teacher by what we could do, We learned to take risks and we pushed ourselves outside of our comfort zone, We learned that the times when we thought we would not have fun, we could, We found that being under the lights can be scary, but we can do it, And we found out that everyone in the class and learn, and sometimes the oldest one in the room will learn the most.

For our current unit about ecosystems and rice, I had the students make a presentation using Google Slides that we will print and put together as a book. I made the slides for the students. I put the titles on them and asked them to find a picture for each one. I then showed the students my example book that I made, with the same slides as they had, and I showed them how to locate legal images through Google Slides and showed how to cite their sources. Most students caught on quickly to this. One of the hardest parts for them, which is hard for any new user to Google Slides, is the way the invisible boxes work. Many of them got stuck when they tried to select their text, but an invisible text box was covering it up and they could not do anything. The next step for them was to add text. This unit I used some paper books I got from Scholastic and the idea was to use that as a guide. Of course there were some students who got stuck with this too. Before we started I put the s...