Thank you Cathy at Reflect and Refine, Jill at My Primary Passion and this week's host Laura at Ruminate and Invigorate for organizing this summer's #cyberPD and a wonderful summer of learning.
At the beginning of each year I interview my students about their reading and writing. I gain information about my student's reading and writing interests, abilities and what they think their strengths and weaknesses are. I plan on adding questions to try and gain information about what students see themselves as experts in. I then hope to pair students up to create tutorials about their expertise. This will help them gain experience in creating tutorials with a topic they feel comfortable with before creating future classroom tutorials.
I'm in the process of creating literacy take-home bags. Each bag will have a theme (ex. spiders). Inside the bag will be Wonders from Wonderopolis and fiction and nonfiction books. Originally I planned on having each child have a wonder journal to record their thinking, learning and wonders in throughout the week they have the bag at home. After reading Novembers book, I am going to create a blog or page on our class blog where students can blog about their learning. I'm going to encourage students, parents and families to leave comments on other's postings too. Students who don't have internet access at home can use a wonder journal and then blog at school. In addition, I'm going to have a parent/student night at school to go over expectations and explain everything. I will be sharing more about this in later posts.
I'm excited for the final #cyberPD chat, this Monday, July 22nd at 8:00 PM EST on Twitter.
I LOVE your idea of having the kids post tutorials based on their areas of expertise and may borrow it, as it ties in really well to our identity unit.
ReplyDeleteToo bad the Twitter chat is at night (it will be 2AM my time). I hope someone will archive it, as I am sure it will be full of great ideas!
SO important to build in a contingency plan for the students without internet access!! Thanks for the reminder!!
ReplyDeleteBarb,
ReplyDeleteThe researcher section and wonder kept spinning through my mind together. I have been considering a class selection of one wonder in a given time period to study a bit. Then I thought we could share our learning. I love your idea of wonder bags and think these would be perfect after we have collected information. Students could take them home to share with their families. Hmmmm.
Like you, I want to learn more about student expertise. Having students with their own blogs had helped me to discover some of these, but I like your ideas for adding them to your interview early in the year.
This has been an amazing discussion. I always learn so much.
Cathy
Barb,
ReplyDeleteI was getting excited thinking about the things that students could post, write about and link to in their blog posts. I hope you will share some of their posts with us as they are created. What a great idea!