Teacher Feature: Blue Water Coast Elementary

This year I will be working with Kerri and her grade 5/6 class one day a week at Blue Water Coast. Today was my first day!

LANGUAGE: WRITING

Blogging Booklets
Students are anxiously awaiting the creation of their blogs. In the meantime, Kerri-Lynn Case Schepers has introduced the idea of blogging to her grade 5/6 class by having them create blogging booklets. The curriculum focus is descriptive paragraph writing to communicate an idea about a variety of topics. Some of the topics the kids are writing about include:

My Family
People Like Me Because . . .
My Favourite Activities
Goals, Strengths, and Next Steps
I’m Most Excited For . . .

The Success Criteria for descriptive paragraphs is outlined as follows:
– topic sentence
– descriptive details
– transition words
– appropriate punctuation
– closing sentence
– voice (ie./ humour)
– word choice (toonie words – descriptive language)
– picture to illustrate the paragraph

For the first draft the kids used their booklets to record their paragraphs and sketch their pictures. Now the kids have been tasked with taking their paragraph and creating a presentation to tell their story using the available technology in their classroom (desktop computers, Chromebooks, iPads)

Some of the presentation tools that the students are using include:
Explain Everything – show our story using pictures, and an audio recording
Video Star – ? (I am not familiar with this app so I will be getting a crash course from one of Kerri’s kids)
iMovie – tell our story with added pictures and music
Google Slides – present your story as a series of pictures with captions
Flip-o-gram – create a graphic slideshow to music

LANGUAGE: READING
Introduction to Sketchnoting using a Graffiti Wall
During Kerri’s read alouds, the kids are given an 11×17 piece of paper to use as a Graffiti Wall. Andrew explained that the Graffiti Wall is a way for them to express their understanding of the story in an artistic and creative way. They use pictures, diagrams, numbers, words, etc. to create a visual retell of the most important events in each chapter. Once Kerri is done reading the book, the kids are going to trade Graffiti Walls and interpret each other’s drawings. The kids will use the app Recording Lite to record themselves retelling their partners Graffiti Wall story. Based on the quality of the retell (we will co-create success criteria for the Graffiti Wall retell), each pair of students will help one another develop their next steps to improve their Graffiti Walls for the next read aloud. Following the second read aloud the kids will learn how to Sketchnote on the iPads.

CHROMEBOOKS UNLEASHED
Today the kids took the Chromebooks for a test-drive. They logged in, set their profile picture, and then learned how to bookmark a site. They started by bookmarking Math Prodigy. The kids were then challenged to use Google to find Kerri-Lynn’s Class Blog and bookmark that as well. This was a great quick introductory lesson for students to introduce Chromebooks.