Persuade Me

I am in the midst of finishing my pre-American Revolution unit. Kids get a feel for the colonies, what types of jobs are available, and how they were different. Then they get a feel for why the colonists want to split from Great Britain- things like the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party. The last section, before diving into the American Revolution, are some speeches for and against independence.

The oddity of this unit is that the kids know the ending: the colonies split (hooray) and win independence (double hooray). The nitty gritty they don't know, nor do they necessarily need to know in 5th grade (bits for sure). But the broader aspects are where they often hold complete fallacies. For example, most of my kids thought that everyone thought slavery was bad (not true- although I am glad they hold that sentiment now, good starting point). Most thought that a majority of people were patriots wanting independence ("Come'n, who wants to pay taxes on paper items?!").

One of the pieces we are doing is a dual reading/writing one. I had kids pick 1's and 2's, then had one student pick a piece of paper out of a bucket. There were two papers in the bucket, and the one she drew was the side (and other's with her number) needed to represent in a bit of speech writing. Why assigned a side? Well we know how it ends, right? Wouldn't you want to be on the winning side too? The excitement in the room when people were drafted into the loyalist and patriot camp was fantastic. It really set the tone for their research since all of them want to have really persuasive speeches. Hopefully that will carry into this week, and some great work and speeches.

Standards

I've had a handful of conversations about state standards of late. To paraphrase all of those conversations: your curriculum is your state standards. The confusion comes with adopted materials that teachers have at their disposal. In any given set of materials you have any number of holes. By that I mean teaching those materials alone will cover a vast majority of your standards, but you'll likely miss a few standards because you don't have a kit hitting that science standard, or a unit that includes money, etc.

Is that a big revelation? No, it isn't. But you need exercise some professional judgement before going through units 1-20 in lockstep.

New Platform

My district is moving towards a roll-out of a new online platform for elementary and secondary students. The platform is an online one-stop site for kids and teachers to access and communicate. I wasn't able to go to the first training because of a conflicting training, but tinkered with it today. I spent about an hour adding discussion posts, creating a blog, adding pictures, and adding "news items." This should be a great addition to the repertoire.

I currently have kids submitting assignments via a dropbox on our district network, and we use our class wiki fairly heavily (although we don't edit it in quite the way we did last year). I have wanted to start a blog for kids, but was reluctant to do so because of privacy issues. While this blog will be restricted to staff, and students, I feel significantly more comfortable with the level of privacy. The audience piece will be different (not people globally or even in the greater Seattle area) but I think it will work out just fine. Why I am doing this on a Saturday is beyond me. Maybe I'm just that much of a geek who has little better to do than think about the instructional possibilities that will grow my practice.

Library Cards

I had a student yesterday who asked: "Mr. Hanson, can I still borrow books from your library next year?" I replied, "Sure you can. You're always welcome to borrow my books." To which the student said, "Good, because you have a lot of books I still want to read and I'm not sure they'll have them in 6th grade."

If there is one thing I have worked hard to do, it is maintaining my classroom library. I have a shelf in the front of the room with "new books" which are either new or new to my classroom. To have kids talking about books, asking me what they should read next, and an exchange like that above, couldn't make me any happier. There were kids who weren't excited about reading before this year that are plowing through whole series' of books. It makes me excited to go find some more books!

Trends in Reading

My kids were describing their characters, outside and in, today. I phrase outside and in because the outside is often the most common first go-to for my kiddos when it comes to describing characters. The start is often something like...

• Well he is tall, with brown hair.


• She is a girl that is 12 who has short curly hair.

What I have stressed is that the external characteristics are not the only important piece of information. It certainly helps you visualize what the author is trying to convey, letting you truly see who that character is in your minds-eye. But the real work begins when you start to understand who the character is, what they do, and how they interact with others (next week we'll work on how you take those characteristics and hypothesize/theorize about solutions). It is fascinating to see the evidence kids provide for characteristics, and how they put it all together.

But where this is going is how successful my kids are with specific skills in reading. Today was story elements (GLE 2.2.3? or 1? or something like that) while tomorrow might be predictions. Either way I need to track those individual skills. Previously I mentioned how reading is often seen (by me at least) holistically. You might not be good at predicting, but you can evaluate, compare, and identify story elements. As a whole you are in good shape. But for me I need to do a better job tracking those individual skills. So what I am doing is breaking out my assessment by the pieces I am doing for my instruction- ie. story elements, inferring, etc. I'll still track the whole. But I want to be sure I am watching the individual skills. This way I can filter assessments, and see whether those are part of an overall trend (i.e. not very successful with story elements) or whether it was a blip on the screen. The visual in simply playing around today was powerful, and should help me better meet kids needs.

Project vs. Content

Tomorrow we'll have a finish day: finish up the outstanding work, and make it truly outstanding (instead of it standing out for not being finished!). As I have mentioned a few times before, I struggle balancing moving kids along versus letting them work through content and programs to finish really good projects. A great example is our Best Explorer Project. For a few it was a zip, and they moved through it rather quickly. But for the majority it was a slow crawl through the content, project planning and implementation process. At some point 2 days becomes 3, becomes 5, becomes two weeks! The length of time is not for lack of understanding. The vast majority understand the task, comprehend the content, and are working through putting it together. But when it was planned (by me!) the amount of time anticipated for completing the project was vastly different than the amount actually required. Great learning moment(s), but not so great currently. What do you do? I have gone through the list of 3 different items that have projects/work that needs to be turned in, and created a list of those needing to submit work. Tomorrow we'll work on a brief piece of work for our novel study books, then turn our attention to completing those projects and moving on. Some of this is rooted in the netbooks we have, and the blessing/curse that they provide. We have them so we use them. They have been a great tool, and allow kids to do a variety of publishing and research projects. But they also end up being the ultimate distraction- can I add another animation? can I add some music? do I need to change the start/end location on the picture with PhotoStory? Great for allowing kids to create visual media, but also great at extending projects from 2 days to 10 (particularly when you don't want to!). Not a problem with my kids, since they are trying to make really good projects... not to mention the fact that they are trying to understand how to use different programs. But a learning experience for me.