No, I'm not Shead, though he is the inspiration for this. In case you don't know, Shead is our seven year old Rottweiler. He is the darling of our lives, but more about him another time.
Today is my first blog post and I'm very excited!!! I've read may blogs that my friends, acquaintences, and affiliated organizations have written, and now would like to try my hand with it for a couple of reasons. I'd like to do this for myself and my friends, and I'd like to try it in anticipation of asking my students to try their hand at blogging. I think that it'll be a rewarding experience for all of us!!!
What's going on -
- This weekend is the overnight for GS Camping Adventures. There are 11 leaders in this group - mostly from a service unit that will be having their camporee in May. The weekend should be interesting, as should any CA weekend, but this one especially because even thought it's not a winter camping training weekend, we'll be having high temps in the low 40's with a breeze and a 50% chance of precipitation. In my opinion, it's absolutely fantastic training weather!!! Almost any weather they have for their first outing with their troops will be better than this!!! The old "if you can make it through this, you can make it through anything" philosophy!!! I've reviewed layering, hats, gloves, extra wool socks, rain gear for equipment and from the menu side, substantial food. In other words -skip the salad and prep the "wet" ingredients at home. I'll let you know how they do and maybe I'll even have pictures!!!
- At school, I'm a reading tutor working with 5th grade remedial readers. This week, we're finishing up working with the cause and effect text structure, and we're getting ready to start working on inferencing. I thought the timing was perfect - I did a push-in to a classroom yesterday where the classroom teacher was introducing the inferencing concept. One of the huge advantages of my job is that I get to observe classroom teachers on a regular basis. This gives me the opportunity to see both the great and not so great lessons that students receive. Yesterday's inferencing lesson, or at least what I saw of it before I had to leave for a pull out group, was very good. She asked me to participate and I gave students some examples. I then went on to tie to their writing. The "don't tell me, show me" principle(dtmsmp)! This morning on the way in, I was thinking about inferencing and the "dtmsmp" and came up with "in writing, we tell you to show us what's going on instead of telling us, and in reading, the author doesn't tell us - he shows us and we have to figure out what's going on." I know that the classroom teacher was going to share some examples of good "showing" with the students. I connected this with a presentation that I was on the program at the Literacy Conference that I went to over the weekend (more on this later) where the presenter was going to share an author's work with students, the students would analyze the work for author's craft and then compose their own piece of writing in the style of the author using the tools that the author did. I'd like to put together a lesson(s) to go with an inferring unit where students wrote inferences modeling them after an author. I'll have to give it some thought.
- The Literacy Conference Saturday at Central Connecticut University. This was the 3rd year that they've held it, and I've attended all three. I've found it to be a worthwhile use of time and money (relatively inexpensive). This year David Berliner was the featured speaker - statistics don't show success for NCLB. I attended three sessions - a presentation on using blogging for student discussion of literature and wikis for publication of student work. I found this extremely interesting because I sat through the presentation working out in my mind how using blogging and wikis could be incorporated into the social studies unit the a group of us have put together using MVP by Douglas Evans. We've used the literature circle operating format with text specific jobs. We're about a week in to the book and students are having a fantastic time. They love the idea of reading a work of fiction in social studies!!! Back to the conference - the advantage of using a blog for student communication is that it appears to bring more equality of participation to the group discussions. A wiki could be used for an end of unit project with students publishing maybe a book summary, author biography, along with supporting pages for various topics of interest tied to the book- in this case, currency, points of interest, time zones, modes of transportation, etc. We'll look to see if we can incorporate this for next year. The second presentation was on using art and having students do a detailed analysis of what it's showing. The presenter worked with AP students and three of his students shared their interpretations of three different pieces of artwork with us. I found it interesting to see what upper level students were doing with this because Susan (the reading specialist that I work with) uses artwork by Norman Rockwell to introduce the concept of inferring. "What do we know by looking at the picture?" The third presentation was on collaboration for teachers. Bill Farr from UConn went through a portion of a research project that he had done following two pairs of teachers as they implemented collaboration. A couple of important points that came out of this research was that all adults who have anything to do with the students in these classes need to be part of the collab process, and that time needs to be provided and committed to by all involved including administration for the collab process. I connected this to what I know about what's coming up with RTI and how imperative it is for all of us to be on the same page!!! Though some of of the presentations seemed to be more immediately valuable than others, they were all worth the time spent.
I think that I'm going to stop here for today. Tonight I'm going to watch the Martha Stewart episode that aired yesterday morning and is being rerun tonight on FLN. Lion Brand Yarn is supposed to be a feature on the show. Also, IT'S TUESDAY and that means BIGGEST LOSER!!! Michael and I'll both sit down for that!
Until next time!
Christy
