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Observation

Posted in Gifted Education, Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged Natasha Trethewey, poetry analysis, teacher evaluation, TPCASTT on September 9, 2014| 9 Comments »

Join the Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Challenge.

I think I may be crazy, but I’ve decided to try a new strategy for my formal observation. This is the observation that is announced. My principal and I met for our pre-observation interview on Friday. I told her that I had never taught this skill before. She said, “Oh, we usually advise that you don’t do that, but I’m sure you can handle it.” What was I thinking?

In pre-AP training this summer, I learned about a strategy for poetry analysis called TP-CASTT. Then when I was perusing the Guidebooks for the state curriculum, I found it was used for advanced fourth grade. I have gifted 5th and 6th graders, so this should be right on target for them. We are going to analyze Natasha Trethewey’s poem, Providence. I can relate to this poem because I was a child living in Jackson, Ms in 1969 when Hurricane Camille struck the Gulf Coast. I think adding in my personal experience as well as my passion for Natasha Trethewey’s poem will come through in this lesson.

I also searched online and found a great graphic organizer on Read, Write, Think. I plan to use this organizer to help us collect our thoughts. I have the poem ready on ActiveInspire to project on the Promethean, barring no computer tech problems.

So, what am I worried about? I got this, right?

I will probably lose some sleep worrying about my evaluation. I will give my students a little lecture about behavior before my principal comes in; however, lively conversation with student interaction is actually a good thing on the rubric. I can be sure my students will be engaged.

So cross your fingers and say a little prayer because I am probably in the midst of this lesson as you read this post. I am preaching to myself, “Evaluation is a good thing. You are a good teacher. Be calm and teach on!”

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Blogging Fever

Posted in Blogging, Digital Learning, Gifted Education, Teaching, Writing, tagged Kidblog, student blogging on September 7, 2014| 14 Comments »

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My students have gotten the blogging fever. I did not expect this and am silently cheering. I am sharing our kidblog site with a colleague whose students are also posting. Also, two former students who are now in middle school are joining in. The site is getting lots of activity.

On my simple rubric for kidblog, my students have four requirements, each worth 10 points: Post 3 times, GUMS (Grammar, Usage, Mechanics, Spelling), 3 comments, and comments must be thoughtful and constructive. Here are the highlights:

1. Lots of posts! What are you reading? Slice of Life stories. Poetry Friday. My students are writing a lot. This must be good for them. I have seen great strides in just these first three weeks of school. They are adding details. They feel like their writing matters. They are using sentence structure and humor to make their writing more interesting.

2. I am using their posts to teach grammar, either in whole group or one on one. This is working. My students are realizing that grammar matters to the reader. They are noticing when other writers are not following grammar rules.

3. Sharing and caring! My students are getting to know the other students posting on our blog. They are relating, connecting, wondering.

How do I turn this activity into data? In this day of data-driven instruction, I want to find a way to track and analyze the progress of my students. I know it’s happening, but how do I prove it? I welcome your responses.

To read some of the many student blog posts, click here.
Please link up your own digital literacy post with Mr. Linky.

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Celebration in Action

Posted in Celebration Saturday, Gifted Education, Gratitude, Writing, tagged apple peeler, birthdays, student poetry on August 30, 2014| 10 Comments »

Ruth Ayres invites us the celebrate each week. Click over to her site Discover. Play. Build. to read more celebrations.

What a wonderful week with students! It’s our second week together, and we worked hard. I am requiring three blog posts each week: It’s Monday: What are you Reading?, Tuesday Slice of Life, and Poetry Friday. I thought it might be too much, but so far, my students are meeting the challenge. I am more and more convinced that blogging is the way to get students writing. You can read their writing here. I want to share one of the fingerprint poems. I posted the lesson on Poetry Friday.

Unique Fingerprint

I am the expert: you are the rookie.
You will never see my treasure,
Invisible to you but
Everything to me.
My print shines bright like a diamond,
As beautiful as a bow.
My treasure is one thing I love more than gold.
Maybe one day you will see my unique design,
But for now you have to classify your own.
by Kielan, all rights reserved

I love to celebrate birthdays with my students. For her birthday celebration, Kielan wanted me to bring the apple peeler and apples. She remembered how much fun it was from last year. The kids loved it!

Kim Douillard’s photo challenge this week was action. I did a video of the apple peeler in action. At the very end of the video, you can hear Emily say, “You’re about the best teacher in the universe.”

We also celebrated Andrew’s birthday. Look at the lovely cupcake his talented mother made!

Emily brought me a special gift this week, a happiness box. She gave it to me on Monday which segued perfectly into a discussion of tone. She had turned my irritable mood into joy!

Come back tomorrow for DigiLit Sunday and our first Chalkabration. What are you celebrating this week?

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Hair in My Eyes

Posted in Gifted Education, Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged hair style, model for students, Slice of Life on August 26, 2014| 6 Comments »

Join the Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Challenge.

Now that school is in full swing, I am writing my Slice of Life story with the purpose of modeling for my students. We talked about what a Slice of Life story is by analyzing my post last week about the snake. The board was full of things they noticed, such as having a climax and resolution (Whoa, high five!) A few of you wrote great comments that I could use to teach about making connections in your comments.

Yesterday I read a comment on my Poetry Friday post from Bridget Magee, “Margaret, this poem and the animation are both amazing! I love the lines:’an ornament hanging on a tree,
a bronze clasp pen for my lapel.’ It reminds me of when my oldest daughter was about 5 or 6 (she’s 17 now) and she used to love to walk the neighborhood collecting cicada exoskeletons until one day she pulled one of the tree and the fella was still in there! SHE just about jumped out of her own skin!” This comment models specific feedback and also making a personal connection. I explained to my students that writers like to know people are connecting to what they write. Thank you all for helping me teach valuable lessons about writing and blogging.

You can read some of my students’ SOL stories on our kidblog site. Feel free to leave comments.

This week’s Slice of Life:

My hair has become a problem. This summer (I can’t even remember exactly why) I grew out my bangs. For years I have had short bangs. As they grew out some, I was drying them off to the side, and my husband said to me, “I like your hair. It makes you look younger.” Exactly what any woman loves to hear, right?

On my next scheduled haircut, I told my stylist, “Jeff likes it, so we need to keep growing it out.”

Then the next visit (I schedule my haircuts six weeks apart), I had had enough of the headbands, so I told her to cut it. Keep the bangs long. In fact, I texted a friend to send a picture of her hair, cut in a cute short pixie style. “That’s what I want.”

“Your hair is not going to be straight unless you use a straight iron,” said Gale. Other than using a blow dryer, I do not own or use any other tools on my hair. Gale cut and styled it with the straight iron, knowing full well I would not do this.

My husband goes to the same hair salon. He walked in the next week and announced that he loved my hair. That was a first for Gale, so she was thrilled.

This weekend my husband and I went out dancing which is one of our favorite things to do together. In August the heat is such that no AC can keep up with it, much less when there are warm bodies dancing. The dance hall had placed huge fans around the dance floor. Every time we danced past one of these fans, Woosh! my hair blew across my face. My husband could tell I was getting really annoyed by this.

When we were riding home, he said, “I like your hair even when it’s flying in your face.” I guess I’m stuck with these annoying bangs for a little while longer.

Selfies: old hair style on the left, new on the right.

For this Slice, I am modeling how you can write a story about anything. Some of my students have a hard time thinking of something to write about. Using my own writing to model, I can share stories of my life and teach them that anything, even your hair style, can become a Slice of Life story.

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Technology and Grammar

Posted in Digital Learning, Gifted Education, tagged grammar, mini-lessons, no red ink on August 24, 2014| 5 Comments »

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

Once again it is DigiLit Sunday. I hope you will link up your digital literacy ~~wisdom~~ post and read and comment on others. This is how we build an active online community.

Over the last few years, much has been said about teaching grammar in isolation. Basically, it doesn’t work. Skill and drill is out. These days grammar lessons are embedded into writing instruction. Having such small groups of students, I have the luxury of conferencing individually with a student about grammar using his/her own writing. I also give mini-lessons when a question comes up that everyone can benefit from.

This year I plan to add a new web-based grammar practice. My supervisor in gifted shared this site with us at our recent inservice. She said her high school students told her that many of the skills they practiced were on the ACT. The site is https://www.noredink.com/ It is free to an extent, but there is a premium version we are considering purchasing if my supervisor gets enough interest. I signed my students up and created 3 weeks of assignments in about 15 minutes. The site uses students’ pop culture interests to generate practice sentences. If a student misses a question, an instructional page pops up. My hope is this site will be motivating and individualized and take little effort on my part. I am looking forward to giving it a try.

The other plan I have for grammar is to design mini-lessons from the students’ posts on kidblogs. This gives me easy access to their writing. This week when they wrote their Slice of Life entries, I noticed problems with punctuation of compound sentences. I also noticed that one of my fourth graders used capitalization correctly. I will highlight the correct grammar (celebrate this) and ask for input on the comma problems.

I believe that grammar is important, but I do not want to focus so much on it that our creative writing suffers. By incorporating web-based practice and mini-lessons from student writing, I will encourage good grammar skills and celebrate writing.

Add your Digital Literacy post with Mr. Linky.

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Technology Trouble

Posted in Digital Learning, Gifted Education, tagged technology in the classroom on August 17, 2014| 5 Comments »

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

Welcome to DigiLit Sunday. I hope you will write a post about how digital literacy is working (or not working) in your classroom and link up with Mr. Linky at the end of this post.

I had a frustrating week with technology. I do not like to be negative, but when technology doesn’t work, it is maddening. I have been setting up my classrooms (yes, I have 2) this week. Since I have decided to use the website Wonderopolis for a weekly language lesson, it is imperative that my connections to the Promethean work. Wonderopolis is interactive, so you have to be able to use your pens on the board.

My school system gave every certified teacher a laptop about 4 years ago. This has been very good for me as I switch from one school to another. I just take the laptop with me, and everything I need is there. I have had trouble off and on for the last few years with my laptop connecting to the Promethean. Lots has been done to it to try to resolve the problem. This week, however, the technician who came pronounced that it was a hardware problem, and the laptop was out of warranty, so I was out of options.

In order to be able to use one of the two desktops for the Promethean, I had to reconfigure my classroom. That meant moving furniture by myself. But by Friday, I had it all rearranged. Then another technician came by. She tried everything, determined to make the laptop connect. Yet again, there was no solution. Now I have to order a splitter thing to be able to see the desktop monitor as well as the Promethean board. Office Depot didn’t carry it. It is now ordered.

Now I am learning to save everything to Dropbox so that I can use it at both schools. Dropbox is a great tool. I have two accounts, one with my school email address and one with my personal account. I use Dropbox to share documents with my writing group and with my gifted team.

I hope next Sunday I will have some good news about technology. I am trying to take this all in stride and hope it is not an indication of the kind of school year I will have.

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Wonder Thinglink

Posted in Digital Learning, Gifted Education, tagged Innovative Education, language arts, starling murmurations, Thinglink, Wonderopolis on August 10, 2014| 12 Comments »

Welcome to DigiLit Sunday. Please consider joining in the roundup by posting a Digital Literacy post and linking up with Mr. Linky.

I am working on framing my daily language lessons for my gifted students in grades 5 and 6 using WONDER. Here is a form for creating your own Wonder lesson. Wonder template for ELA (2) This framework will lead my students to explore Wonderopolis, an amazing educational site, as well as help them respond to real-world content. These frames are aligned to the Common Core Standards and use pre-AP skills.

I worked on the Thinglink Teacher Challenge this summer. I wanted to put my Wonder framework into a Thinglink image. I used Starling Murmurations as the Wonder for this experiment. I also tried PollDaddy to embed two polls, one for a definition and one for a question. I put in links with each of the Wonder activities. These activities include

W- Exploring the wonder
O- What is your opinion?
N- Notes, find words of awe and wonder
D- Define phenomenon
E- On Tapestry, rewrite phrases to create a logical sentence.
R- Response to reading: Summarize and article.

Here is the link to Thinglink:

Have you ever wondered about Starling Murmurations?

I wonder if Thinglink will make the work of Wonder more motivating or more time-consuming. Will Thinglink be a useful tool in my classroom or not worth the time it takes me to create one? All this remains to be seen as I begin working with my students this year. All in all, trying new applications is challenging and fun, so I hope my excitement translates to the children.

What new technology will you try this year? Don’t forget to link up.

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Summer Creative Connections

Posted in Gifted Education, Slice of Life, tagged #clmooc, gifted education, Tapestry, Wonderopolis on July 22, 2014| 13 Comments »

Join the Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Challenge.

I continue to try my hand at creative endeavors. #CLMOOC Challenge for this week is fairly easy, a 5 image story. I got the Tapestry app on my phone (free), so it was easy to upload 5 silly shots of my cat hiding in a grocery bag. It was as though she thought she was invisible. We are a little nutty about our animals. I took some shots of this cat trick and made a 5 image Tapestry story. Unfortunately, wordpress does not embed Tapestry. Click on the link. I promise it’ll only take a second. Can you add the words?

https://readtapestry.com/s/ZDImIgGiA/

Last week I got my brain fried in pre-AP training. I finally had some time to process and work with a frame that my colleague Beth and I came up with. We want to use the theme of Wonder for our year. I tried Wonderopolis with my students a few times last year and they loved it. In my thinking/planning journal we brainstormed what each letter could stand for and began planning to use this format for our daily language lesson. I’m thinking it can guide my whole week.

I am such a ~~teacher-geek~~ passionate teacher that I spent hours planning out Wonder frames for the school year.

First I selected an interesting Wonder from Wonderopolis, such as Fireflies. Each Wonder includes a video, a nonfiction text passage, vocabulary, links, and interactive quizes. A teacher’s dream website! I mean who doesn’t get excited about learning about bioluminescence?

On Monday, students will read and paraphrase a quote: “All that I know about us is that beautiful things never last, that’s why fireflies flash.”

On Tuesday, they will analyze a Robert Frost poem about fireflies: (Underline the word(s) that fireflies are compared to in the poem and explain how they are similar to fireflies.)
“Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.” Robert Frost

On Wednesday, they will define bioluminescence and use it in a short paragraph.

On Thursday, they will edit this sentence, “Fireflies may be none for there glow power but their knot alone. ”
On Friday, they will read another passage from Mental Floss and make an inference.

I can only imagine how my classroom will be buzzing about fireflies. In the meantime, my students will be able to read their own choices (I am determined to channel Donalyn Miller this year) and will be writing their own pieces during writing workshop. I’m excited to find a way to feel like I am incorporating valuable lessons without sacrificing student choice. Here is a pdf file of the Wonder template for ELA (2).

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Light on the Bayou

Posted in Blogging, Digital Learning, Gifted Education, tagged #light, gifted education, PD for teachers, photography, student learning, Twitter, writing on July 13, 2014| 10 Comments »

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Today for DigiLit Sunday I have something on my mind about this internet PD community. I have tapped into so many teacher challenges this summer I run the risk of being overwhelmed. But instead I am fascinated and wonder what this may mean for my students and for the future of how we educate.

By participating in multiple online learning groups such as the Thinglink Teacher Challenge and Connected Learning (CLMOOC), I connect to other bloggers and find things that pique my interest. For example, Kim Douillard posted a weekly photo challenge in the CLMOOC Facebook group this week. Her blog site is Thinking through my Lens. I have a feeling Kim does not just use her phone for taking pictures, but that’s what I use. This week’s theme was #light. Just after I read her blog post, I took a walk outside to this amazing display of light.

Bayou morning photo by Margaret Simon

Did you say “Ah!”? Yeah, me too. That’s my world and sometimes I forget to appreciate it. So I uploaded my amazing bayou scene to Twitter and got this response from Carol Varsalona.

I will probably do this because I enjoy a challenge and especially one that makes me write. (Did I mention I am also doing Teachers Write camp with Kate Messner?)

So my Digital Learning question is this: How do we tap into student interests and create online learning environments for them to connect to and learn from? I teach gifted children. They have strong interest areas (obsessions, really). They are much more adept at computer skills than I am. Can we do this for them? Or is this being done and I don’t know about it? I did involve my students in the March Slice of Life Challenge put out by the Two (Six) Writing Teachers. They loved it. And for some, it was a deep learning experience.

Enter this conversation by leaving a comment. Should we have a Twitter chat or Google Hang out? I’ve never led one of those myself, but I’m willing to try.

Leave a link to your digilit post here.

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Celebrate Seeing Good

Posted in Celebration Saturday, Creativity, Gifted Education, Gratitude, Writing, tagged Easter Lily, Lagniappe Yoga, New Iberia City Council, The Shadows, yoga on May 24, 2014| 9 Comments »

Ruth Ayres invites us to celebrate each week. I have the opportunity to not only share my joys with you, but to reflect on them for myself, a good exercise in itself.

1. Easter Lilies are blooming in abundance this year. Perhaps they liked the extra cold winter and are letting us know all is new.

2. Summer Reading #Bookaday: Donalyn Miller challenges us to read a book a day in the summer. I am a slow reader, so I am hoping to read a book a week. Here is only part of the stack I brought home from my classroom to read.

3. My husband had cataract surgery this week. He gave me his ring to hold because he couldn’t wear any jewelry. I only had to wear it for an hour. The surgery was a success. His eye bruised, so in his best Cajun accent, he likes to say, “It looks baad, but it sees good.”

4. Our students presented a big check for $3,711.00 to the West End Park Revitalization Project at the City Council meeting this week. We are so proud of their dedication.

5. My friend and yoga instructor, Rachel, led a yoga class at our local plantation home, The Shadows. It was invigorating to stretch outside on the sculptured lawn, looking up into the oaks. If only there were no ants.

6. I forgot to take pictures of this, but three of my gifted students spent their last day with me. I pulled out a box of science kids, and they made hover crafts with balloons and CDs, and a catapult out of a staple remover and plastic spoon. They were focused, cooperative, and had fun.

It was a wonderful week and now on to the BIG WEEKEND! Happy Summer, y’all!

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