Room 18 Book Reviews

The students of Room 18 have been working on writing book reviews of some of the different books they have been reading. We started at the beginning of February by coming up with a list of things we thought would be important to include in a book review, and then created a book review template together. After working through a few example together as a class, the students wrote a review of the book we had just finished at the time - Book Three (The Rescue) of Gordon Korman's 'Kidnapped' series. Since then, some of the students have written one or more reviews on their own, of other books they've read. They each have a spot on the wall in our classroom library where they display their reviews - it's been great to see the students reading each other's reviews, and reading new books based on those recommendations! The Haiku Deck below includes each student's most recent review - we hope you enjoy them... and maybe try reading one or more of the books, based on their recommendations!

  Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Read and Relax Day!

Today, as a wrap-up to I Love To Read month, and February's Mystery Motivator, we had 'Read and Relax' Day in Room 18 this morning. The students were encouraged to come in their PJs, and bring blankets and stuffed animals to read with. We pushed the desks aside, and the students spent the morning spread out in the room reading on their own and with each other, as well as spending some time listening to me read to them. It was a fantastic morning... and you could hear a pin drop when they were reading to themselves!

I Love To Read: MLA Daryl Reid

As part of I Love To Read month, we were lucky enough to have the Hon. Daryl Reid, MLA for Transcona, come and read to our class today - he did a fantastic job of reading Dr. Seuss' 'Horton Hears a Who'! He also talked about the Manitoba Legislature, and he even came in dressed in the robes he wears in his role as the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly (he even brought the students some bookmarks and Golden Boy pins!). After learning about how government works earlier in the year, and participating in an Elections Manitoba in-class workshop on how an election works, it was great to have Mr. Reid come to Radisson, and allow the students to make a real-life connection to what they had previously learned.

Genius Hour!

Today, I introduced the students to the idea of Genius Hour. What is Genius Hour, you ask? Well, it's a portion of class time (in our case, 2 periods every Friday, during our Daily 5 time) where students will be encouraged to learn about what they want to learn about. This fits in beautifully with the idea of our Daily 5 time, where students are working towards improving their reading and writing skills, as they will eventually have to share what they have learned with the rest of the class, in some form, when they are finished. I am excited for the next phase of this, which will occur next week - as a class, we will start brainstorming some ideas of what they want to learn more about, and then beginning to plan how they will go about learning what they want to learn. I told the students that, this weekend, I want all of them to think about what it is they'd like to learn more about; what question would they like answered (and if it can be answered in 30 seconds by 'Googling' it, we probably have to tweak the question!). I've included the Haiku Deck presentation that I created to introduce the idea to them (inspired by the one Chris Kesler created, which can be viewed at geniushour.com), so that you can get an idea of what we're embarking on - join us for the ride, and see what interesting things the students (and you!) can learn!

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Random Acts of Kindness in action!

As we blogged about yesterday, we've been talking about random acts of kindness in our classroom. Today, the class decided to brighten the day of the adults in our school, by making cards of appreciation, and handing them out to the staff, complete with a little something sweet! The students who passed them out said that it was great to see the reaction of the recipients of these, which included a lot of smiles, 'thank you's, and even a hug or two! The students in the class also commented on how good it felt to do something nice for someone else, especially when it was unexpected! It's days like this (even though it was indoor recess AGAIN!) that make me glad that I'm a teacher!

Random Acts of Kindness

In case you are not aware, this week (Feb. 10-16) is Random Acts of Kindness Week. So, this morning, we made a list of random acts of kindness we had done for others, or someone else had done for us, and talked about how good it made us feel to both give and receive a random act of kindness. After that, the students wrote in their journals about a random act of kindness they could do for someone this week. This is an activating activity for a number of things we are going to be doing this week - stay tuned!

Perimeter and Area paper slide videos: brainstorming

We got ideas of things we should do for our paper slide videos. The paper slide videos are on perimeter and area. - Zoey

In order for the students to show their understanding of what they have learned over the past few weeks about perimeter and area in Math, they will be making paper slide videos on these topics, and posting them to our blog. Today, we talked about what a paper slide video is, and watched some other paper slide videos made by my students last year, in order to make a list of what they thought makes for a good paper slide video. After that, they brainstormed about what they would need to include in the videos, to show others what they had learned about perimeter and area (and maybe, to teach some others, too!). Here are the ideas that they came up with:

Zoey takes over our blog!

Today's classroom reporter for the blog was Zoey. Here are a few of her observations of the day:

In Math, we did number of the day. The number was 755. We also checked our perimeter and area sheets.
In the afternoon, we read the Three Little Pigs in French, and in Music, we learned a new welcome song and played drums. At the end of the day, we did Social Studies in the computer lab. The grade 3's were doing their trading cards about Canadian citizens, and the grade 4's wrote their facts about the different Canadian regions on a paper, to make trivia game questions. - Zoey

Great job reporting on our day, Zoey!

Classroom reporters - making our notes into a post

Today, I conferred with Emily and Nolan about what went on in our day - here are the notes I transcribed from them:

Here is what they decided to post, based on our notes:

"This morning in Science, the Grade 4s were working with Ms. Bell on Light and Sound in Science. We were doing experiments on reflection with flashlights, mirrors, and people. I learned that when you shine a light on a mirror, it bounces off the mirror that you're shining it on toward the object, and it goes back and forth. The Grade 3s were working with Mr. H. in Science, on friction. We did an experiment for friction. We used an elastic band and paper clips for pulling a sled. We tried it on its own first, and then we put wheels under it, and then we put salt under it, to see what happened. It made less friction with the wheels and with the salt." - Emily and Nolan

I thought they did a really good job of talking about what they did in Science today, adding detail and description to the notes we made together. I'm looking forward to having the students report on our day on a regular basis, starting next week.

Classroom reporters

As you can see, it's been a long time since our last post... much too long (sorry, folks)! In order to address this, we're going to start having classroom reporters in Room 18, in order to make sure that we keep our readers up to date (regularly!) on what's going on in our classroom. The reporter(s) will then take those notes, and write a blog post based on them. The classroom reporter job will be a rotating one, and all students will get a chance to take part in the job. I've made up a note-making template, in order for them to keep track of what goes on in our day - today, we worked together as a class to come up with some notes of what went on in our day. Here's what we came up with:

 

 

 

We will do the same tomorrow, but we'll take it one step further, and talk about how to take some of our notes, and use them to write an interesting blog post. Stay tuned!