We are publishers of nonfiction!

What do you remember about your writing units in elementary school? I remember being taught that all of my papers had to be written in five paragraphs: introductory paragraphs, three main paragraphs for the body, and a concluding paragraph. There was the sandwich anchor chart and the umbrella anchor chart, and of course each paragraph needed the famous transition words such as "first of all" and "in conclusion." How booooooooooring.

In order to introduce writing a well-researched expository paper, we first began by exploring topics that were interesting to us. Some students chose ideas such as hurricanes, chocolate, Bigfoot, Cleopatra, optical illusions, and so forth. Students were curious about so many different topics! With each topic, we wrote down several questions that we would want answered. "How is chocolate made?" or "How do optical illusions work?" We narrowed our lists down to our favorite two or three topics and went into the Instructional Research [IR] Room in our library to start looking for valid resources. With the questions in hand, students began looking for answers. As they gathered information, they wrote down facts on a notecard, one notecard per fact, with the resource's bibliography contents on the back so that they could cite these sources correctly later in their published piece. Once students had gathered enough information, they sorted their notecards into categories for their paragraphs and began writing, revising, and editing, until finally they were able to put together a final copy!

Honestly, this was my favorite writing unit thus far. Not just because students were highly engaged in what they were researching and writing about, but because of our final event. We had a publishing party where we invited special guests to come and read our pieces! We sent out letters to teachers, staff, siblings in the building, and other students we had relationships with. We set our published pieces on our desks and had a gallery walk, leaving comments on butcher paper that was set underneath.

Kudos to our fabulous writers for writing such wonderful and informative pieces!

Marshmallow Challenge

First seen on TED (talks on riveting ideas: technology, entertainment, and design), my administration from my last school brought in this wonderful team building exercise called, "The Marshmallow Challenge." It was such a great way to begin the conversation of collaboration, communication, different roles that different people have, and so forth that I thought, "This is such a great way for students to be involved in this conversation that prepares them for teamwork and collaboration!"

The materials that each team of four received were: 20 spaghetti sticks, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. Each team only had 18 minutes to build the tallest freestanding structure with a few simple rules: the entire marshmallow must be on top of the structure, the structure can be made up of as many or as few of the materials provided, the spaghetti sticks, string, and tape can be broken/cut, and the structure had to be freestanding at the end of the 18 minutes.

Was I really looking for the tallest freestanding structure? Of course not. I actually think that most teams both times (I did it at the beginning of the year in August and then once again in January) were unable to have a structure remain standing at the end of time. The main question I had in mind for discussion was, "How do we ensure quality collaboration takes place to accomplish our goals as a team?" When students were asked this, most of them were able to share out the key points I wanted to emphasize!

I can't remember which team won and what the measurements of their structure, but if you click on the link above to watch the video, you'll find a surprising group that always beats the average! What group do you think would do well in a challenge like this? How would you do with a group of friends? Coworkers? What other topics of conversation would you suggest I bring up next time?

KidBlogs

For a couple of years now, I've been journaling with my students. They received their own journal for the quarter and we would write back and forth about their weeks (I only have time to read and respond once a week, if that!) and more importantly, their academic learning. However, as things get busy at curriculum and professional development and meetings and assessments and benchmarks and you get the idea...it was definitely hard to keep up with it. But I did it and oftentimes received entries that were mediocre. Most of the students would talk about their plans for the weekend or what they did on the weekends and I wanted more meat. I wanted to learn what they were learning and what they thought of it. I wanted to be able to read it on the spot and respond to their entries as soon as possible!

I had entertained the thought of students blogging when I was a teacher in Chicago, but we didn't have the resources to start it at school nor did the students have access to a computer or wifi at home. So I completely forgot about my dream of students blogging.

But, lo and behold! My colleague/teammate/mentor/friend had blogged with her students from last year and was blogging with this year's students! I had to jump on board right away! And I have the resources at school now with a choice of using laptops or even the iPads! Wow!

So, how did we start? Well in December, students first had to learn about blogging, commenting, and internet safety! So we an open conversation about what a blog is and what it means to comment on someone's blog. In retrospect, I wish we made anchor charts that looked a little like this (via ipadsatburley.blogspot.com):

 

But that's okay! Now I know what I want to do next time around!

After all the discussions of what a blog is and how a blog represents who you are, students went and made a paper copy of a blog. Once decor was finished and they "posted" a new post, students commented on each other's blog on post-it notes! What a great experience to get accustomed to the idea of blogging (props to Jen Bearden, that wonderful colleague I mentioned before for that idea)!

Now unfortunately, we haven't been blogging as much as we would like (hm, that sounds familiar from a personal stance), but we look forward to blogging more once we go 1:1 with iPads tomorrow! Now we can have immediate learning posts and have more meaningful conversations online!

So, please check out our KidBlog and leave us comments as we continue our endeavor of learning!