Mr Hammerlund

I had a post planned about my year, but I scrapped it. Instead, I am going to reflect on what went right. After all, if I don't write this down, it won't be written down at all. English as an Additional Language All EAL students improved and 3 of the 5 from the beginning of the year are ready to exit. This was a big jump since they came with no English at all. They are now included in the group of students I need to tell to be quiet (a good thing). Collaborative Projects We did a few collaborative writing projects this year through Traveling Tales and Traveling Teddy . These are two awesome projects that I can recommend to anyone. Here is one of the stories we helped write. Writing skills It has been amazing to look back at some of the writing pieces students did in August and compare them to recent writings. Yes, it was Grade 1 so of course there would be progress, but it was a long journey to get to where we ended. Making I introduced my students to th...

Our current unit in Where We are in Time and Place has us looking at innovations and discovery. This unit I held back the poster with the central idea, instead, wanting to see if my teaching was leading them to their own conclusions. This is not revolutionary, but I haven't done it much this year. I have been waiting for them to be ready. The first week of the unit saw us making and testing paper airplanes, looking at the history of different things (cars, airplanes, bicycles, toys - we started with airplanes), trying to make sense of data we collected, and making tops. Note: I happened to use the airplane video because there were many questions about how airplanes worked. I fell into the trap of misleading students and then having it snowball by students becoming interested and asking questions, eventually ending up off track. This reminds me to be more careful with provocations -- or at least to do a more thorough reflection afterward. Still, part of me thi...

I am in the thick of a course about teaching writing. One suggestion I learned from this course, and I've heard it before in a workshop on the Readers and Writers Workshop Models, is to have students keep a notebook of ideas for future writings. These ideas, or seeds as I first heard them referred, are just that -- seeds for future stories to grow out of. It's another way of saying curation. While reading, I thought of what I would do if I were keeping a notebook. In fact, I am keeping a notebook, it's just in the form of this blog. So understanding that I am more digital than paper, got me to think about how I curate content from around the web. I use Twitter and have an IFTTT recipe set up so my "favorites" on Twitter are saved to a separate blog I keep for me or anyone who is looking for interesting teaching ideas. That got me thinking about students. I would prefer that students use a notebook. But what if I had students who were able t...