Week Five

Sorry this post is late, but just to keep everyone in the loop:

Friday was a very busy day, with lots to deal with. Classes took field trips. Ms. Catania was out. (Congratulations, Ms. Catania. Hope your day was WONDERFUL!) But we still managed to get a lot done:

K-14: The kindergarten class has been busy practicing their typing by working on the ABC books in Keynote. They are halfway done. Taking this one step further, we went back to our All About My Family presentations and learned how to put a picture from PhotoBooth into our presentations. The class also showed off their family posters. Ms. Ieong needs to make sure that the picture release forms are all collected from students by next week so we can showcase more Kindergarten work!

1-104: First grade continued their research on community workers by visiting the firehouse. Hopefully Ms. Hamlin took lots of pictures so we can see what students learned and did. During our project period, students used their graphic organizers to write their podcast scripts. We used a round-robin format so that students could record their scripts in garage band. We are about halfway done recording scripts.

2-204: Second graders finished their notetaking and research. Using their notes, they began scripting their movies. We learned that it is important to make our beginning exciting in order to draw in the viewer. We also learned that when writing a script it is important to skip lines. 1) So that there is room to make changes in your script and 2) To make it easier to read the script. We also discussed revising our script to make it interesting and entertaining. Ms. Newman will make sure the scripts are done by next week.

3-304: Third graders had gotten about halfway done with their storyboards. We continued to work on the storyboards for two periods. While most groups had a good start, we discussed how many of the storyboards were vague and not specific. We discussed how it is better to focus on specific places to go, foods to eat, things to see, etc. Students collected images for their movies to help them with their storyboards.

4-404: We missed working with the fourth grade because of their trip. We will make up the time next week. Mr. Amft will review students research questions and make sure that every student has good questions that relate to the content of the project.

5-504: We reviewed the essential questions fifth graders had prepared for their research. Most questions were good, although some needed to be revised and some groups found that their questions fell into categories or groups. We also discussed finding reliable sources for our information. Wiki sites, such as wikianswers.com and wikipedia are not necessarily reliable. We discussed strategies for determining if a site was reliable or not and also using non-Internet resources.

On a final note, our presentation day is coming faster than you think. We are past the halfway mark! Let me know if you have any concerns or questions about the upcoming weeks and what is expected from you and your students. Thank you everyone for your hard work. You are doing a great job!