So this year our school is holding weekly PLC (Personal Learning Committee)meetings in which various grade levels meet to plan intervention and enrichment activities. For me this means that I see an extra class or two each week. The art teacher and myself have decided to partner up in lessons on these days. I typically read a book to the students, integrate some technology piece if applicable, and then they rotate to art to create a visual piece that reflects some topic from the book.
Here was the month of October's lesson.
FIRST and SECOND grade students listened to the fun, fun, and more fun book There was an Old Lady Who was Not Afraid of Anything.
I started this lesson by showing this video from YouTube that reads/sings the book. I stopped it before it told the ending and then I physcially read the book to the students. We then watch the rest of the video. Student loved learning about on·o·mat·o·poe·ias and acting them out as we read this book.
Students then rotated to art and made these amazing pumpkins.
I LOVE author visits. Any time I get an opportunity to host an author visit I try to make it happen. Nothing excites a student more than hearing an author speak of their life as an author and the books they create. Thanks to the Blue Manatee book store for providing this opportunity.
Students were talking about his visit for many weeks. They are still waiting to check out his books from the Media Center.
Each Tuesday and Thursday morning we have our Tech/Media crew come into the Media Center to explore whatever it is that their hearts desire as long as it is related to media or tech in some way. I sit back and watch and it is amazing what these kids create and learn by experimenting. I wish there was more time for this during our day. Here is what is happening on some of these cool fall days.
The boys are experimenting with the LittleBits. They have learned how to create vibrations and music sounds so far. They are wanting to build a car next.
Samantha working on keyboarding.
I also have one student who manages our Public Relation slideshow that we run during lunches so he has to make sure the information is up-to-date and ready to show. The information he is responsible for is news, birthdays, school closings, etc. He must also make sure the slideshow if visually appealing to students.
For those of you wanting to know how to organize LittleBits so your students can be independent when placing items back here is a pic of how I did it. You can get the images of the parts from the LittleBits website.
So every afternoon we have a crew come in and do our morning announcements for the next day. We call them WSUM. They are responsonsible for reporting the daily weather, birthdays, lunch menu, fun fact, and any school news we my have. I have the fortunate experience of leading 15 great kids on this journey. This year marked a few changes- one of which involved using the Green Screen to film. We are loving it! Take a look at one of our WSUM videos (this one was a little long because we had book talkers for the upcoming book fair)!
