Spelling to Start the Year

Have you ever found that by following your school’s spelling program (whatever it may be) your students can spell words like “deceit” and “portion” on the Friday test, but misspell much simpler words in their daily writing? In my classroom, I start the year by testing kids on their knowledge of core words - high-frequency words that will be most common in their second-grade writing. It is based on the 135 core words that spelling curriculum developer Rebecca Sitton focuses on in her second grade spelling units. I use several activities to help students learn the core words they are having trouble spelling. Click here for a freebie I recently posted to TpT that includes the materials I created to help kids with these high-frequency words. There's an introduction included in the material explaining how I use it in my classroom, but it's very flexible and can be incorporated in many different ways.

A Great Read Aloud to Start the Year

As I'm preparing to go back into the classroom in a few weeks, I'm sifting through my read aloud books to decide which I should start the year with. One book that I love reading to kids of any age is Odd Velvet by Mary Whitcomb (author) and Tara Callahan King (illustrator). The story is about a young girl whose classmates think she is odd because her clothes, lunches, interests and name are so different from their own. As the story progresses, they take the time to get to know her and find they really like her for what makes her unique.

I use this as a start to the character education I do in my classroom by teaching why your oddities and peculiarities make you interesting, setting the stage that we will spend the year celebrating our differences. My kids have requested to hear this book time and time again, and will even ask me to read it when we have visiting classes come in for read aloud. It can be difficult to find in bookstores, so click here to find it on Amazon.

Fun side note ... I first became introduced to this book because my mom's name is Velvet and the character is a lot like her (physically and behaviorally). A client of hers brought it to her as a gift several years ago, and for a while she wondered if the author had known her in her childhood because the similarities were uncanny.

Technology Hot Topics

While at Lausanne Learning Institute this past week, I sat in on several technology-focused learning sessions. By the end of the conference, my mind was swirling with so many ideas, tips, and resources that I'm sure I will be digesting them for a while. I was able, however, to sift through and pick out three hot topics that often seemed the center of discussion. Here they are:

#1 - Blogging can be a powerful learning tool: Well ... obviously I was inspired by the blogging sessions. But surprisingly (to me, at least) the biggest topic of conversation concerned getting our students online to blog. Did you know that students who have a public web brand/presence from a young age are less likely to engage in inappropriate online behavior/branding when they're older? That is one piece of information I heard in a session taught by educational technology expert, Jeff Whipple. Whipple gave a great talk on digital citizenship stressing the idea that information is no longer static (think textbooks that are outdated the moment they're printed). Rather, it is digital, networked and overwhelming. Today's kids (and adults for that matter) are getting their information online, so we need to make sure we are teaching them how to research, validate and synchronize information. This means our students will be online, sifting through the good, the bad and the ugly and they need our help to figure out not only how to sift, but how to behave when they're out there looking. Part of this involves helping them develop a web presence and teaching them how to build their brand online.

Now ... several schools do not allow student presence online for privacy reasons, and some teachers (especially those of us teaching younger students) do not feel comfortable letting their students write public posts online for the world to see (and respond to). Kids can still learn digital citizenship at smaller levels (by communicating, say, in a classroom-only online environment). There is a blog for everyone, no matter the level of privacy, monitoring or activity you desire. There are options for password protecting blogs, making them open only to a pre-determined audience, and most offer the ability to monitor comments coming to your students as well as the comments your students are making. Here is a great example of a first-grade class who uses blogging as a learning tool. Notice that each student has a personal blog that is open for the world to see, which helps them learn how to appropriately communicate to a vast online audience. Again, every school and teacher is different as far as their privacy comfort level, and blog sites such as edublogs.org (my personal favorite for kids - ad-free and lots of capabilities) offer privacy and monitoring settings to meet the needs of each age and school.

#2 - Digital student portfolios just make a lot of sense: Teachers are starting to see the benefits of using digital portfolios in order to keep track of student work throughout the year. When you use pictures, audio files and videos to capture student reading, writing, math and other activities, it makes it easier to have conversations with parents and other teachers about student work and progress. Now ... there are several ways to go about having a digital portfolio. For desktop users, a simple Google search for student portfolio websites will generate several options for managing student portfolios online. If, like me, you use an iPad in your daily teaching, I recommend the Evernote app (which I'm sure many of you have either already heard of, or are already using in some way). I explored several different options for housing digital portfolios and rather than bog you down with the pros and cons for each app, I will explain why I really liked Evernote for my students. I have been playing around with the free version to explore its capabilities and I do believe the free version will end up being all I need in my classroom this year.

Within Evernote you can create a separate folder for each student and keep typed notes in each folder, as well as images (pictures of their work, etc) and audio recordings (think, fluency tests or reading conferences that you record straight onto the app). The best part is, when you are finished with a student's folder, you can email it either to yourself as a permanent record and/or to his/her parent for personal record. The images, type and recordings you have saved will send in the email. One of the biggest draws for me was the ability to include several, separate audio files within one note.

#3 - Flipped classrooms can offer incredible differentiation possibilities (even for second graders): I fall somewhere in the middle of the flipped classroom debate. On one hand, anything you can do to get more hands-on, collaborative experiences in class has my vote. But recent studies have shown that it can be counterproductive to introduce material outside of class before a hands-on approach occurs. I experimented a little bit with a blended classroom in the spring, but have yet to experiment with a true flipped classroom wherein my students are introduced to a topic at home (via a video of me teaching it to them). I've decided to experiment with a quasi-flip this year.

For my students who have trouble grasping concepts when I first introduce them, I'm going to offer them a pre-teach (I'm not sure what else to call it right now). A pre-teach will be a short video introducing a topic (and in second grade, we're talking about topics like What is a past-tense verb? How do you add two-digit numbers? and What does it mean to indent a paragraph? - topics that lend themselves nicely to a five-minute introduction with opportunities to apply and practice) that goes home the night before I introduce it in class (via QR code on a slip of paper, which they can easily scan/watch on their iPads). In the videos I will be sure to give examples and practice opportunities that mirror those I will use the next day during my whole-group lesson/introduction. I hope it helps these students build confidence because they will already know a little bit about new topics before they're introduced in class.

Again, those were the three hot topics in the sessions I attended. My blog posts will rarely be this long, but I do feel that four days of information is hard to narrow down with applicable examples, and I wanted to be able to provide some of the research behind these hot topics. I will be sure to post my own classroom examples of each as I implement these ideas into my room this year. Onward, tech-y-teachers!

Teach, Write, Share

I guess it makes sense that I would start blogging at some point in my career. Given that I, A) love what I do (teaching second graders) and spend hours each week researching ideas and different classroom models, B) love to write and C) love to share ideas, it seems blogging is a natural venue for me to share my teaching adventures and connect with other educators.

But why now? The elementary school I work for implemented a one-to-one laptop program last year and I had the fortune of traveling to the Lausanne Learning Institute in Memphis, Tennessee with a few colleagues for training this week. We had an intensive three-day training on different technologies in the classroom, and after multiple sessions on varied topics, blogging was the "ah-ha" that hooked me. I want to put my love for teaching, writing and collaborating to use to connect globally with other teachers and share what I'm doing in my second-grade classroom. So here's to hoping I share ideas you will find valuable, get the hang of conversational writing, post often enough to keep you interested, and only misspell hard words. :)