Enrichment Menu for Writing

The Unquiet Librarian is at it again.  She is back with new and exciting ideas about writing.  She is a middle school librarian and writing teacher.  If you love getting new ideas for writing then you should definitely consider following her blog.

I found two topics on writing that I wanted to share.  One is the March Madness Enrichment Learning Menu and the other is Visual Thinking Strategies (should handwriting die?)  

The March Madness Enrichment program.  This is program is so top-notch.  She got to work on it because she was seeing that her students were struggling to stay focused and needed some inspiration.  Plus she has the common problem so many teachers have :  students with a wide range of abilities.  She decided to come up with 9 different enrichment stations some of which include: Vocabulary.com, NoRedInk.com, creative writing with Reader's Theatre Scripts, creative writing with Tableaux, revising and editing task cards+QR codes, revising with QR codes, persona poems, and two clubs (Women's History Club and a Evidence Detective Club).

Each choice was developed with learning styles in mind.  Some of the groups are individual, others are collaborative and some are purely creative.  The stations are meant only for enrichment and are to be done only after classwork has been finished.  She says that she taught the whole system to her classes and then put the choices on display in a hanging file folder system.  If kids forget what each is about or need it read to them again, they can scan the QR codes can be scanned to hear it repeated or see it as a slideshow.  Click befow for more info.

Enrichment menus for writing


The next article is on Visual Thinking Strategies.  She says that most of us think about showing pictures as prompts to get writers juiced up on a topic to write about, but this time she had an idea that took a different turn.  Her students had been writing about whether handwriting is useful or not. She got an idea to pull out personal notes, recipes and letters from her mother.  She told her students that reading her mother's handwriting makes her feel closer to her even though she isn't there.  (Her mother passed away) and for her her handwriting is a strong connect to her.



She projected her handwriting up on the wall to them and got them to look at her handwriting.  They talked about it and did 5-7 minute burst sessions of writing on what they saw, thought and wondered about.  Then they did a turn and talk with one another.  Their noticings were amazing and it gave them another perspective on "if handwriting should die."  Click below for more info.

Writers see, think and wonder

Nearpod

Technology is a fast nowadays.  It's so hard to keep up with it all.  Nearpod is one of those programs that you may not have heard about.  It's not an app, but rather a place where people can upload lessons.  From what I have seen the lesson are in the form of powerpoints with interactive links. What you do is you establish an account and you can do so with Google, email or Office 365.  Once you are in you can pick a topic that you're interested in.  They have generic topics like math, science, social studies, ELA and so forth but they also have very specific lessons ready to go.  The unfortunate part is that many of these lessons have to be purchased.  The ones I looked into were about $2.99 in that price range.  

This made me think that boy, this is a way for educators to earn a little extra money. Teachers Pay Teachers is a site that is similar to this one in that educators have come together and created time-saving physical resources that are attractive and can be sold to other educators.  I'm waiting for the day when somehow someway we can get an paid account for Teachers Pay Teachers, but that's another story for another day.  

Anyway back to Nearpod, there is a section that has free resources and these are definitely worth checking into.  I looked into one on "Finding Slope Review," and it started with an objective moved onto to a discussion question and asked for the students to type in their answer.  Looking further it I found that if you have iPad or some other tablet device you can "write," on it and add your notes. 

This is just one example, depending on what you look at you may not find the same thing.  I have to say that the lessons may vary in quality and so you will have to preview it, but the BIG positive here is that this is technology (scores big with kids), it's technologically interactive for kids and teachers (BIG score) and because it's technology-based you can e-mail, link it to various sites, save it in your Nearpod library and use it again next year and EVEN develop reports!! (TIME SAVER-YAY!)  

Now for the negatives:  you will need some kind of device (chromebooks, tablets) for students to use in order to have them participate in the lesson.  For the first lesson you may be able to get away with just using it on your tablet and picking students to come up and "write," on it for you.  So that would be a way to start, but eventually you'll need something for them to work on.  

Nearpod, it's not an app it's lesson ready to go-yay!

Classroom Dojo

   

Classroom Dojo, you may have heard of this program or you may have not.  Chances are you will.  This is a nifty little program that keeps parents connected with everything you do in your classroom.  I personally like it because it's only accessible to them and no one else.  What you do is you first enroll in the program and establish yourself a classroom presence.  After that you add all of your students.  When you add students, Classroom Dojo assigns them a little monster avatar, then you have your class set.

It's nice because you can click on each kid and you can give them "praise," such as helping others, participating, persistence and other good things.  If you wanted to you could also put them in groups for various reasons, perhaps project work or other things such as this.  I personally love being able to upload pictures of things we are doing in class and parents can see instantly what their children learned that day or how an activity turned out.  It keeps track of all of your photos and in a way it's a timeline of every thing you did that year which could make for a great video for both you and your parents.  Since kinder is such a pivotal year parents have access to photos from school that they can look back on for year to come.  

This is the first year I have used it and I have been extremely happy with it.  I foresee using it from now on.  The only problem I have had with it is that not all parents have joined up.  The only thing you can do is send out printed invitations (which Classroom Dojo generates for you) every so often in the hopes that they will join.  What's even cooler is they can generate invitations in other languages in case your parents speak something other than English.  

It's a wonderful site.  I totally recommend it.  You can find it at this site:  Classroom Dojo