#LoveTeaching

Alright so this week is celebrating the love of teaching by having teachers share why they love teaching. I’ll start out with a blog post and then try to tweet out some examples and maybe have a few more creations throughout the week. 

I love teaching because it allows me to build relationships with kids and create. I can make all sorts of cool things like quick instructional examples to help improve my teaching. Not only that, but I get to test out new ideas and constantly work on improving my instruction as I continually get to know my students. The science behind teaching is what makes me love it. Getting to know what makes your students tick and trying new things to help them learn. When you find something that actually works and motivates students is just amazing. Then I love teaching even more when the thing I found is something I created myself. Well maybe not created myself, but stole and adapted myself. 

Being able to build relationships and create such a wide variety of educational tools or resources for students is why I love teaching. I am excited for this week to keep reminding myself everyday why I love teaching and this has really come at a great time for me!

Reading Menus Part 2

So another week down trying to implement more choice and independent reading in my classroom. I have learned a lot this week about my students. They want to do their work on these menus that I have made for them. Unfortunately, they aren't sure how to select a book to do it with. This is probably due to them always being told what to read and not being asked to select their own text. I also realized most students have trouble picking a book. I asked them why they picked a book and most were not even sure. When I followed up with “What would you like to read?” most fell silent. These barriers have led to some mixed results and also information on where to go next. In addition as I continue my way through The Book Whisperer I gain more inspiration and confidence that I can find something that works for me and my students.

Here are my plans as I go forward.

I am going to get my library reorganized by genre the best I know how. This will help the kids and help me recommend. I started just picking up books reading the blurb and discussing what genre it was only to find half my students wanted to try that book. My students want to read, they just need practice picking their own books. I need to get things more organized for them and help them figure this out.

I am also going to simplify their response work. I will have a skill we focus on during the week and something related to that. Beyond that we will just write blog posts about their books. I'll work with them and encourage their blogging. Basically each week I'll have my students complete something to practice a skill we taught and then write a review, recommendation, or summary on their blog about their reading.

Finally, I am going to utilize some other reading programs that students have access to to help give students some other types of extra practice. In addition only giving me about a third of the class to work on reading with.

These changes might help make some improvements over the last few weeks. We will see how they respond next week.

Reading Menus

The past week or so I took to Twitter to regain some inspiration. I have regained a lot! First of all I want to blog a lot more often, but in shorter chunks. Second I decided to revamp my reading and writing block into something that resembles workshops combined with some Daily 5 structures.

To dive into this I figured I would use reading choice menus. I am not sure what I’ll call them, because they go by many names. I gave out one to students that I had found and made no changes to because it accomplished what I wanted this week anyway.

On the first day the students were told they were to select a nonfiction book of their choice, read it, and complete $50 off the menu. The one I had chosen was broken down by price of nonfiction reading response activities. Immediately the students began doing items from the menu without having read a book. Part of this was due to excitement and part due to the fact you can probably do a lot of nonfiction responses by skimming and scanning without reading an entire book. I facilitated, gritted my teeth and watched things not go entirely as planned. Many students weren’t sure what to do, they began acting out, complaining, or just doing other things. Eventually, most of them got it together and gained some direction in terms of text they were going to work with and which assignments they might try.

Day two went a lot better. Students had direction, and began working on assignments. I circulated asking questions and providing feedback on their work. When we both ended up lost and needing some direction I would suggest they go back and just read some of the book. One huge success I noticed on day two was the poems that students began writing. One option was for students to write poems about the topic. I had a student on day one write a poem about elephants around the whole “Roses are red, violets are blue” style. It rhymed, but the book wasn’t about elephants and it didn’t demonstrate any comprehension of the text. On day two students began writing acrostic poems or looking up poems on the similar topics online and trying to create their own. One set of students were looking for example poems on diamonds and found out how to write a diamante poem. So they began work on writing one of those about a diamond.

Now, things are going great yet, but there has been a lot of improvement in two short days. I can’t wait to see what a whole week brings as I make adjustments to the assignments and time frames. The kids are getting excited and taking advantage of the choice being provided. Hopefully this will continue to grow.

Balance

This year I have been struggling with the idea of how to be great at everything I do. I first thought it wasn't possible. In reality I knew that there had to be a way, I just needed to find it. Maybe reading The Fourteenth Goldfish helped see then possible.

To start, I focused in on being great for my family at home. It has been hard. My wife is working is a job that has proved very challenging and that has been something I am still trying to help with. Our son is 21 months old and spending time with him is a must. As much as I might want to be doing something else, when he plops down on my lap with a book or some Legos I know what needs to be done. Which can be hard when I'm coming home from a long day in the classroom. Or when dinner needs to get on the table and bed time is in 90 minutes.

However in putting my personal life first I have found a balance. I have found ways to be more effective in the use of my time at work by just setting limits. As I take time to reflect at the end of this year, setting limits has gone well in the last few months. I have been able to work on being great for my family and still improving as a teacher. I have also managed to find time to do some fun things just for myself. The keys are setting priorities, limits, and looking for growth towards greatness. I do believe that I can be great at home and at work. It will just be something I am constantly working toward and not necessarily something I will "accomplish". I need to keep on trying though. 

Keeping it Positive

There are too many great things in the world to not constantly be celebrating them. The same can be said for ANY classroom. There are always great things happening and it is my job to keep it positive.

I have known this since my first year teaching and have struggled with it every single day since. I first learned to focus on the positive when I used to give out tickets to students as rewards for positive behaviors. Then at the end of the week there would raffle drawings for a chance to pick from a prize box. This was for fifth grade students and it really worked well for the student population we had. What I noticed though was the following: at the end of the day when I felt like we had gotten a lot accomplished I ended up running out of or had to tear off extra tickets during the day (I would prep 100 each morning). When I felt like it had been a bad day and I was frustrated with not getting things done or student behavior I still had a pocket full of tickets I never gave out.

Too often we get distracted by the negative, and forget about all the great things going on. Although I have shifted from tickets to different forms of rewards and now to Class Dojo points, one thing remains the same. At the end of the day if a lot of points were given out it felt like a good day. When there were not a lot of points given out it felt like a rough day.

My point of reflection is this …

I have completely changed as a teacher over the last 7 years. I have taught students from literally across the country (Las Vegas, North Carolina, and now Texas). I have used 6 different sets of standards since college. I have taught in schools with high poverty and low poverty. Even after this wide range of experiences when I reward and focus more on the positive I feel better about the day, I am more motivated to keep trying, I am excited about my job, and I even dance into work every day!

Remember that there is always greatness, but sometimes we just forget to look for it.

How I Plan to Gamifiy My Classroom

Gamification is a popular method that businesses and some teachers have used to add in game elements to improve productivity and engagement.

I am not sure when I first heard about it, but I decided at ISTE I would give it a shot. I also tried it some at the end of last school year. There will be two aspects that I will put into my self contained fourth grade classroom this school year. I am going to use Class Dojo as an achievement point system and classroom economy. I will also convert all of my grades into experience points instead of percentages. I plan to incorporate a leveling system that allows students to level up, unlocking more rewards they can buy with their achievement/Class Dojo points.

The achievement point thing is simple. Class Dojo has a great platform to award, track, and spend points that I can customize to anything I want. The first few achievements involve completing start of year paperwork.

The hard part was getting my head around a grading system that would work with our school report cards, grading requirements, and fit naturally into the PBL model we are using.  Here is my plan for that.

First of all here are my “rules”

• The report cards require six subjects - reading, grammar, spelling, math, science, and social studies.
• I am required to have one “daily work” grade per week per subject, but these can overlap. So a student could get a reading grade and a social studies grade on the same comprehension assignment.
• I am required to have one “major assignment” grade every three weeks.
• We are trying to go full PBL using the Engage model.

I will create a menu/contract/list of choices that students will complete each week for each subject. Here is one I quickly made for spelling. These assignments will be completed for the “daily grade” and students will need 1000 experience points each week per subject. I will decide on a case by case basis about allowing extra work. Students will have 6 of these menus, or what I’ll call quest lists, each week to complete. Taking time to get extra experience points will only help them level up but not improve the grade. The concern I have is that a student would do extra spelling work when they haven’t finished their math work.  I will assign no homework beyond reading each night, which students can actually use as part of their reading quests if they complete a summary of what they read. Students will be allowed to do their “daily assignment” quests as homework if they choose to.

I plan on providing a lot of opportunity for overlap as well so a student could complete part of their reading, science, and even grammar all in one blog post that summarizes science work they read about and they choose to have evaluated for grammar. The Engage PBL model will have students participating in small group lessons (called workshops) and independent practice work (called DIYs). What I found is that these quests will fit in well with those workshops and DIYs. I just need to customize the quest sheets to match our current project(s).

So now I have presented a quick overview of my plan, time to give it a try, reflect, and make it better. Gamification might be a big topic of my blog posts this school year as I try to integrate it. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments.

Making for the #SummerLS

So I am doing the Summer Learning Series and have been studying making by reading Invent to Learn. In doing so one of the challenges asked me to look into making, reflect on what I have learned, and actually try my hand at making.  I am still in the process of reading Invent to Learn, and am participating in the #ITLchat for the next two Mondays at 8:30 CST, but I have a few thoughts here to reflect on while still in the process and something I have made (or fixed).

Let's start first with my own making inspiration. I first started with a problem ... my 16 month old son discovered it was fun to play with our clothes steamer and began dragging it around. I thought it was harmless until he tipped it over repeatedly and the top broke. The real problem wasn't that it broke, but that it created a top with sharp edges he wanted to scratch the walls to our new apartment with.  We just moved halfway across the country to Texas and the first thing he wanted to to do was destroy I guess.

Well, I put it away and he forgot about it. So did I, until I started reflecting on how I was going to complete this maker challenge that I was falling behind on. It had been a busy time moving and we still had an entire room in our new apartment to set up. Anyway, I was working on cleaning up that room to start setting up the file cabinet when it hit me. I need to fix this problem by making. 

My first thought was to use duct tape, but we had none I could find. I did find a container of Krazy Glue and was going to use that, but it was too old and had dried up. Two tries and two failures. However, we did have plenty of one supply ... PACKING TAPE! So I used that to tape it back together. It really doesn't need to hold much weight as long as I don't let my son get a hold of it.

I taped it together and gave it a trial run. It worked nicely and I have solved a problem by making! It was a simple problem, but I implemented the maker mindset!

Now time to move on and reflect on my learning so far from reading Invent to Learn, #ITLchat, a webinar I watched today by Erin Klein on Setting Up a Brain-Friendly Beautiful Classroom, and exploring the Instructables website. From these I realized one thing I can do as a maker this year. My students need to learn about electrical circuits for one of their science standards, and there are some great resources on the Instructables website about making lighting. Well Erin mentioned how lighting and student involvement should be part of classroom design. So I can have my students design some lighting structures to use in the classroom. That sets up a challenge for students, will meet science standards, and improve my classroom design. Not to mention all of the teachable moments that will arise out of the challenge.