My first comment!!! And other thrilling events...

I was ecstatic to find that elusive first comment on a post from last weekend...thanks Kim!

Other thrilling events:
- It's almost Christmas break!
- We may actually get snow this weekend!
- I get to see my Mom, Dad, brothers, and every other family member in 5 days!

Needless to say, my mind is not exactly on school these days. I think (hope?) that this happens to everyone. But, while sugar plums and candy canes are dancing through my head, the show must go on.

This week in technology we completed the wiki research pages and they did the survey that I created using Google Forms. As I suspected, I am already kicking myself for questions not asked, but I think I will get a good amount of data. They took the survey so seriously; I told them about our class and that the wiki was kind of my experiment. Just like when they do experiments in science class, I had hypotheses of what I thought might happen-- but just like in science, I had to look at the results (their thoughts) to see if my hypotheses were correct. I didn't tell them what my hypotheses were because I didn't want to lead their responses, but they really liked being the ones responsible for giving me the truth. They are too funny.

One unrelated highlight from the week...

...were the kids' "OMG" comments as they read one of the chapters in Chew On This. In each chapter, I have had them use an active reading strategy (note-taking, making an outline, using a double-entry journal, etc etc) to increase their comprehension and figure out what strategy best works for them before heading to high school.

For this particular chapter, they were to use sticky-notes to jot down anything that made them say "OMG". I could have used WOW or something (and considered it) but figured they would respond best to OMG.

Anyway, as they read these 30 pages, they were to write notes on these stickies and them stick them on the page they found the part on. When they came to class on Thursday, this is what we came up with...


This "OMG" wall was a nice basis for our discussion and the subsequent activity.

After thinking about this specific sticky-note strategy, I think a few other ways it could work might be:
- Looking for a theme of friendship in a novel and then spelling out "BFF" as you read
- Looking for the theme of love and then filling in a heart or one of those side-ways heart that kids love (and I definitely do not love)
- Looking for appearances of a particular symbol and have the stickies fill an image of that symbol.
- Looking for either "good" happenings or "bad" happenings in a novel and then have the stickies on a time-line that shows the ebb and flow of how a plot develops
- Looking for "Important" and "Interesting" things that happen as you read and then divide them into a T-Chart on the wall.

All of these instances above would be nice springboards for a deeper analysis type paper about theme, symbolism, plot, etc. The key would be for the kids to have the page numbers on the stickies so they could find examples easily when they wrote a paper at the end (or whatever I'd have them do...)
I just think the idea of a life-size something that kids are responsible for filling in (and want to fill in!) is really cool and engaging...