Light at the end of the tunnel

Reading final CYRM stories and doing Warsaw Ghetto lesson with 4th and 5th. Changed the lesson a little to have kids highlight the place in the article that gave them the answer to the question with the idea that this would help them in testing where they need to be able to find answers to questions on passages. Hard for them to keep from underlining whole sentences. Also did some whiteboard work with younger kids about preparing for winter to get them ready for Three Pebbles and a Song. Whiteboards worked pretty well with the predictable squabbles over pen colors.

Went to the district LMT professional development day Thursday. Some great stuff there. Good idea for bookbags for K's and 1's. Put a book the kid can read and a book that can be read to them in a bag. Make one bag for each kid. Check the books out to the room. Kids take home 1 bag per night. Result??? 300 books read or listened to by students in a year. Concern about losing books? San Francisco did it in their elementary schools and the highest number of books lost by any room was 3. Pretty impressive.

Also a great idea for running a contest where the kids have to read a book from a certain genre and do a summary in order to enter. Small prizes given. Interest and participation level seems to be high in the two schools that piloted it.

Another good idea from the keynote speaker. To avoid plagiarism, have teams of kids research a topic (several topics per classroom) and put together a report. At this point, plagiarism isn't a big issue. Then (the big trick!), pose a question that can only be answered by kids collaborating with information they have each gathered. Example given was do research on preparing for a specific type of disaster, then have kids in teams to write a diaster preparation manual for any disaster that might happen. Interesting.

So many good ideas, so much to do.

posted by Bookworm @ 2:15 PM