Mr Hammerlund

Today was a good day. We spent most of the morning collaborating on a story we helped make for Traveling Tales . The kids were really into making the story, and this time I was more comfortable since I remembered what had happened last time. This time I pushed the story along more instead of waiting too long for more ideas. Once I heard a good idea we moved on to the next part so putting the pieces together did not take too long. After we all talked together about the story by recapping what happened first. We recapped the first part of the story frame-by-frame. When we moved on to brainstorming what could happen next, the students tried to write the entire rest of the story including the ending, so I then showed them that there are, in fact, five different classes making the story. We reviewed the Story Mountain and how the part we were writing, the build-up, was still in the beginning of the story, so you can't give away the ending yet! Brainstorming as a class allow...

Today Grades 3, 4, and 5 were away on a camping trip. In our school that is the bulk of the student body, so this estimation activity was ripe for the taking. This year I have been trying to have my students estimate more. Today I asked my students the question above: Estimate how many are camping today. They, of course, didn't know what "estimate" meant, but they need to learn the correct vocabulary. So I used the word "about" to explain what I meant. I started by asking how many students were in each class.  One boy knew how many students were in Grade 5, so I asked the class to instead "estimate" how many students were in the class.  They still didn't make the connection, so I wrote 20 and 30 on the board and asked which number was closer to their estimate. After they chose 20, I circled it and we moved on to the Grade 4 class. For Grade 4 I tried a different strategy. Instead of giving them a range, I started counting u...

I wish I had prepared for this with anchor chart paper, or just simply paper. But, sometimes these little inquiries happen when you don't expect them ... and those are the best kind. It seems the best inquiries happen when the students are ready. I just ordered poster paper, so I'll be prepared for next time. And next time I would have them think of all the words they know with "oo". Then I would have them grab a book and look for 5 min to see what other words they could find. Then we would come back together and I would ask how they would sort them. I would imagine I would need to guide them to see the difference in sounds, but they would probably surprise me.

For our unit on Who We Are, the focus is on Health and Balance. We have been keeping a Health Journal so we could reflect on how diet, sleep, and exercise affect how we feel. For the past few days, we have been graphing the data. Today I showed my students a sample graph for "my" sleep pattern I had made that showed a sharp increase in the amount of sleep I was getting. One sharp student noticed it and asked what had happened to make the graph jump like it did. I said I didn't know - maybe I had learned how important sleep was just before it jumped. You could also see that the graph plateaued after the sharp increase. I guided students through this one, but I wish I hadn't. It would have been interesting to see them try to think through it by themselves. Maybe I could have put them into groups so they had support. We will have to revisit interpreting graphs sometime, but until then, I need to learn to back off and let the students do what they do best.

Back to the classroom, back to collaborative projects. Traveling Tales is a project I've had my eye on for a few years, and now that I have my own class again, I was able to participate. Traveling Tales uses a five-part story format with each school taking one of the five parts. Our part was the problem in the story, and since we haven't talked about the five-part story format before, there was some front loading to do for this project. At first there were crickets in the room when we were talking about this. I remember looking at the black faces and thinking I'd made a mistake trying this out. And that was after the technical difficulties. But after some prompting and discussion, the story clicked with one boy. He used his reading time to get more ideas for the story by reading about different sea animals and taking notes. After reading, he led the class through his idea of what the problem should be. Now that it's finished, I remember that I forgot to a...