Day Three 'Walk the Talk' Alfriston School

It was another great day in Room 9 at Alfriston School with motivated, industrious students!

Writing
Writing time was phenomenal today. The students did not want to stop writing. Most are writing their stories using their frameworks for reference. Some are at the editing and proof reading stage. Reading generally follows writing so today we said to the students, you can continue writing during reading time if you wish, except for the group I need to see for a reading workshop. All chose to keep writing!












I started a workshop with another group today. Here is the Writing Assessment Checker.

And this is the Workshop. I started them on the 'Telescopic Text' which they had already used with their amazing teacher Bonnie. I gave them the sentence 'Prince Theseus went to Crete' and guided them through expanding and making the sentence better. Their goal is to improve at least 3 sentences in the same way.


 The second workshop was with  a group who is working on paragraphs. One of the student's said he was ready to conference so I was able to go through the Writing Assessment Checker with the whole group. He soon realised that he needed to proof reading his writing again!and here is the workshop. The students played a paragraph game and then we mirrored one of the student's narratives up onto the TV. I encouraged the students to critique and peer edit his work, looking at their Writing Assessment Checker to proof read and edit his story. After a short time l left them to it. After his story was checked, they looked at the others in the group.


 Reading
I met with the 2 journal groups that I started with yesterday and finished the workshop and shared their final activities.
I then met with the 'Percy Jackson' reading group. This was the first time that students had worked with me on this book. We looked at their Vocab Log. I chose a word from one of the student's logs, and showed them how they could use the Search function on Kindle, how to find a dictionary meaning, and how to read in context. That is the focus for their reading from now on is to work on their Vocab log.

Maths
The students now know that straight after morning tea, they come straight into the room, get their books, a device and start on their Maths task Doc. There is no fuss and no time wasted, they just get straight into it. I call a workshop, name the targeted students and allow an open invitation for any others who want to attend.
Today I briefly saw the 'Finding fractions of a number' group. They all knew how to solve fractions of a number, we looked through the rest of the workshop which they said was too easy! So they moved off to work on their Maths Task Doc. I have set myself the goal of finding some harder activities for them.
The second workshop today was improper fractions. The first couple of slides of the games I chose confused them, so I have removed them and found new ones to use tomorrow. Over half of the group got the strategy, I will work with the rest tomorrow with the new activities I have found.


 Inquiry
Today was still about keywords. We looked at Slide 6 and discussed the number of hits.

On slide 8 the students were in groups and used the keywords to see how many hits they got, they recorded these in their topic book, one group recorded on the whiteboard table. They did really well thinking about something they would like to research and coming up with appropriate keywords.
After  that we talked about internet addresses, domain names and URLs

Boys, reading and iPads

I read this article 'Boys take to reading-when it's on an iPad' and I was inclined to agree with the author. In my own experiences teaching recently at Clevedon school in a Year 5/6 class, my previous teaching experiences with iPads, the demonstrations I have shown and the observations I have made in classes this is what I have seen. Boys like reading on iPads, of course you have to choose the books that are likely to interest them but there are some very useful features on the Kindle app that I particularly like and bring reading to life.



Using the example of 'Stormbreaker' $5.34 (US) a great book to entice boys to read (girls like it too). The main character 'Alex Rider' is a like a 'junior' James Bond. When students came across a word that they didn't understand I asked them to highlight it in a particular colour, the dictionary definition would come up as well. They then have to enter that meaning (in their own words) into their vocab log (a Google Spreadsheet). They would then use the word in a sentence. I limited this to 10 words a chapter. When the students met with me they would share which words they had difficulty with.

Another great feature of Kindle is the search for a word in the whole book. All the students would search for the word by tapping on the Search icon (magnifying glass), the incidence of the word might show up on more than one page so we would look at the different snippets to see if we could work it out. If not then they would tap on the snippet to go to the page and then read the paragraph before and the paragraph after and try to work out the word from that context. If they still couldn't work it out, then we would look at the dictionary meaning.












Some dictionary meanings would have more than one meaning so we would have to look at all the meanings and work out which one worked in the context of the story.





A very useful visual feature is found when you tap on a word in the text, the dictionary meaning appears down the bottom of the page but there is a link to Google and Wikipedia as well. Tap on Google and links will appear, in the example below we tapped on Waterloo (for Waterloo Station), there was no link for Waterloo Station so we added the word Station in the search field...now we have images,  links and maps all about Waterloo Station. This is a great way of bringing a book to life where students can see where and what these things look like. Tapping on Wikipedia provides more information and images.

Using these features bring a book alive and help with understanding vocab. If you can't work out what a word means by the dictionary meaning then have a look at Google. If the text talks about an object or a place that you know nothing about then tap on Google or Wikipedia to find out more. An extra activity with the map above was for students to take a screen capture (press the 'Home and Power' buttons together once) and insert that into an app that allows you to draw over the top like

• Showme
• Educreations
• Notability

and draw lines to the places the Character visited on this map. This would be a wonderful activity if the book was set in your own country or town.

Apples iBooks that comes with the iPad does a similar thing. You can highlight words, tap on a word to get a dictionary meaning, and tap on Search Web to go to Google. The difference between this app and Kindle is that iBooks 'Search the Web' feature takes you out of the iBook app where Kindle keeps the Google search within the app and you tap the blue Done button when you want to return back to the story.

So do try this with your students, especially using the integrated 'Google' and 'Wikipedia' to find images, maps and more information about the word. You will see their vocab knowledge grow and they will become more independent about finding meanings for themselves.

Book Reviews with iPads and Google Docs

I was asked to work with some Year 2 and 3 children today on writing book reviews. They had read the story on the school Kindles or the Kindle app on the iPad.
e-Books can be purchased from Amazon

Geronimo Stilton 'Lost Treasure of the Emerald Eye'

They had discovered how they could write notes.
I saw this as a great opportunity for writing notes myself and leaving 'Think about' questions and comprehension questions on pages for students to look at while reading the book. Students can then add their answers to the note and all of the group can share their understandings through the note feature.

All of these children have Google app accounts so I made a Google Doc template for them to work from. They used computers for the Google Docs as the Drawing elements cannot be edited on an iPad.

We talked about the book and some of the features of the story  and then I showed them the template I had shared with them. I took a couple minutes explaining how they could access the different embedded draw items and then we discussed what 'Synopsis, Review and Character Descriptions were.

I had intended them to use the Google Draw tools for their book cover but as we had access to iPads we used the Free version of Crayola Paint and Create. They drew their pictures and emailed them to themselves and then we pasted them into the Draw box. They then used the Google Draw tools to add their Book titles and Author names.
Below is Charlotte's work.

A lot of today's session was about getting used to writing and editing in the Google Doc. There was a lot of sharing of ideas and 'how to do things' amongst the group. The next time we work on this template with a new book we will look more closely at the content the students write.