Comment Guide, revised

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Last year, I posted the comment guide that we would use with my students when we blog. Looking back on it, I think it's pretty good, but we'll add a few things to improve upon it.

Before we start doing that, we will have to revisit our expectations for leaving a comment. Hopefully they will recall our classroom discussions around leaving comments. We talked a lot about how sometimes our comments are the only way we are known on a blog or on the internet. We need to think about what kind of impression we are making when we leave comments.

Commenting Guide

Pertinent It should connect to the original post, or original comment.
Positive You want to encourage the author.
Purposeful Only leave a comment when you have something to say.
Professional Use your best writing conventions - capitalization, punctuation, spelling, etc.

 

In addition to this, I've added another point:
Personal Greet your blogger! "Dear Mr. Arakaki," or "Dear Billy Bob".

My original post drew ideas from Mrs. Yollis' Classroom Blog: How to Compose a Quality Comment.

Substitutes

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What do I do when I'm out of the classroom and my kids go nuts? I worked pretty hard to leave decent plans, but I know that the day was a waste because of disrespectful behaviors towards the sub.

This week is a crazy week. I'm out three days: Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Monday and Tuesday are district training days and Thursday I am taking two students on a field trip. I think this is the most that I've ever been out in a month. Ever.

The kids I've got this year are so much fun! They have loads of energy and the boys always want to play and draw. They're a great group of kids and most of them are really close friends with each other, so every day is like a hang sesh. I'll have to admit, the first few weeks were a little tough, and I'd go home thinking about what little we accomplished and became frustrated about what we did not.

And since my first day out this year resulted in the "UNRULY" note left by the substitute, I worked hard trying to find activities for the class to do. This is what I planned, let me know where I went wrong.

Daily Routines I kept all of the daily routines, minus our at home reading check (which requires the Promethean Board and my laptop), so the kids did their language arts warm up in the morning, their quickwrite before lunch and their math fact quiz in the afternoon. These all take about two minutes each and students work on them independently.

Reading I used a whole group read aloud lesson to model the parts of a narrative text. During the read aloud, the teacher would stop and identify characters, setting and plot and keep track of them throughout the story. After this, students would move into their independent read time (they are up to twenty minutes of on task independent reading) thinking about the parts of their stories.

Social Studies Ended the chapter last week, so the students were given their chapter assessment, which has three parts. Multiple Choice, Social Studies Skills, and Show You Know. The students are able to use the notes that they took during the chapter readings and activities, and a few of the kids were allowed to use their textbooks.

Math The class would review and spend time playing a multiplication card game in pairs while completing a recording sheet independently. Then, halfway through, they would transition to playing a division card game, also keeping a record sheet.

Writing We would share a different style of writing with the class by reading a book out loud. After hearing the style of the text, the students would create their own stories modeled after the book.

So yeah, came back to the classroom to find that not much was produced by the class. How unfortunate. I want everyone else to see how wonderful and hard-working these kids are. For some reason, it appears that they only do that when I am there.

I'm searching for ways inspire them to be responsible for their own learning, rather than to simply please someone else.

Planning ahead

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Even though I can spend a good chunk of time planning out my lessons, activities and goals for a day of school, a tiny change in events can throw everything out of whack. At least I'm now a day ahead in my detailed planning.

The morning was supposed to look like this:
- A.M. Stuff (Morning warm ups, jobs, announcements, etc.)
- Music
- PE
- A birthday snack
- QuikWrite
- Reading Logs
- Blogs
- Social Studies Reading
- Interactive skits

I had everything planned out and I even checked in with my coteacher yesterday to solidify our plans. It was supposed to be such a great day with everything ready to go.

Then, the change of plans.

Now, I'm normally a pretty flexible guy, don't get me wrong. And I wasn't upset at all that our schedule had changed. It just proved to me that even though I can plan everything out, I also need to be MAJORLY flexible to the mood and state of my class in the moment. To the last minute changes that end up creating non-profitable teaching moments.

This year, I've decided that I am going to try something new. I am not going to plan more than a day or two out in advance. In the past, I've always planned out a whole week ahead, but this year, I find myself constantly rewriting plans and scrapping them anyway. What I've planned wasn't working.

I needed to throw out my plans and just prepare myself for options. Prepare myself for variety. That takes a lot more time, but in doing so, I'm being more available to my kids and I am able to find out where they want to go next and see how I can redirect them to their true learning target.

Anyways, after everything on the schedule, the only thing we missed out on was our Social Studies activities, and the kids didn't really mind that at all. Flexible. Me and the kids.

Also - check out my post on 'How to Post' from my Monroe5A blog.

Blogs

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We've started blogs this week. I posted this to my Monroe5A blog, the blog which I am using to model for my students this year.

First Day of Blogs

The students were so excited to sign up for their blogs today! It's been a few weeks in the making, but we finally did it. Everyone who came to school today was able to register their blogs!

During our Computer time today, I went with the class to help them log into their Google Apps for Education accounts and activate their Blogger services. Everyone was able to name their blog (appropriately, of course) and select an address for their blog.

In the next few days, we'll be experimenting with layouts, publishing drafts and preparing to launch our blogs to be shared. Watch this space for more information.

First Posts

The students are raging with excitement because today they were able to start drafting their first posts to their blogs! They were asked to introduce themselves to their readers and welcome them to their blog. We encouraged conversations and guided students to close their posts with questions.

A few students were able to finish drafting their posts and publish them. Take a look at them and leave them a comment if you could.

Dominik's Blog
Kamden's Blog

The remaining days this week we will start to post some of our writing ideas and start sharing links to each others' blogs.