Informal Reading Inventory--Burns & Roe

This year I have tried giving the Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) as an alternative to the PM Benchmark.  The IRI is easy to administer and has the running record component that is essential for testing fluency and decoding.  This test does a more comprehensive breakdown of the reading strategies.

Overall, the instructional levels came out lower than on the PM Benchmark.  However, that was not my main concern.

I was interested in seeing if there were common difficulties with reading strategies.  This information could help guide my instruction, regardless of reading level.  From the data, I could see that inference and finding detail were a concern. I will be able to use the strengths of main idea and cause/effect to strengthen areas of difficulty.



Another piece of information you can get from the IRI which I am currently playing around with is listening comprehension.  It will be interesting to see if students test higher on listening...this will help to see if they use the strategies at all.

Because there are four different forms, there is flexibility in how to test.

Both the PM Benchmark and the IRI have their pros and cons. The key to either assessment is to administer it properly and analyze the results in order to drive instruction.

Low Prep Math Games

This resource is really good for creating low prep math games, using dice, charts, tables, etc.  It is aligned to the Common Core in the States, but very much can meet our outcomes.  Learning targets, teaching tips and technology tips are very helpful.  There is also information on how to differentiate the game.  This book is not flashy and colourful so a person might not take the time to look through it, but the games are engaging and meaningful.

Keeping up with Tech

One thing is for sure- technology is always changing! I find that using social media is a fantastic way to find out about new tech tools, and learn about updates to old favourites. 

Over the summer there were lots of updates to Google Classroom and Drive. If you want to check them out, here is a great article that summarizes all the new features: Google Updates You Might Have Missed

Here are a few different people you can follow and places you can follow to help you keep your technology game up-to-date!

•  Follow "Free Tech for Teachers" on Facebook. The author is always in the know about new updates and cool tech tools
• Hop on Twitter and give follow these awesome tech people:
• @edutopia
• @ditchthattextbook 
• @ShakeUpLearning 
• @Alice Keeler 
• @rmbyrne
• There are SO many other great people to follow, you just have to explore a bit!
• Search the following hashtags on twitter
• #edtech
• #googleEdu
• #ipaded
• Check out the blog- If you scroll back through old posts, you will find lots of different tech ideas. Also, the more we share and post, the richer the resources we have access to on here! 
• Collaborate/chat with coworkers. Even in different division, our teachers are doing amazing things with different tech tools that have the potential to be used throughout the school. 
• And you can always bug me! 

Its important to remember that while technology is awesome, it needs to be meaningful as well. The goal of technology in the classroom should be to improve student learning, and so as teachers we need to look at how we are using the technology to do that. Sometimes we might need to use a different tech tool, or find a more traditional approach in order to ensure students are receiving meaningful learning opportunities. 

Get Epic!

Hey everyone! Below is the link for that Get Epic! website I emailed you all about a couple weeks ago. If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, the website is filled with e-books. They have so many different categories and genres, and many of the books have the option to be read aloud. Some of the books even list the A.R level! The website is absolutely free for educators, which is pretty great. I myself, have been using it a tonne since I discovered it. I often will play one of the read aloud stories to them during snack time. My kids look forward to this everyday. I encourage you all to check out the app as well. Both the website and the app are really quite easy to use. There is even an educator's dashboard where you can add and manage student profiles and view their reading progress. Oh! And there's also teacher resources available as well. Take a look at it - hopefully you and your students will enjoy it as much as me and my students do.

https://www.getepic.com

Picture Prompts

It can be hard to find good picture prompts for writing.  When doing the PAT this year, we took note of the website they used for the prompt as our kids were able to generate a lot of interesting and unique stories.  The site has a number of children's illustrators. Upon looking at the website, we noticed a lot of good pictures that could be used for both inspiration for writing and assessments.  

Check out illustrations at:  http://www.tugeau2.com/

Below are a few examples of pictures from the site.

Damian Ward

Jason Dove

Holly Clinton Brown

Parts of Speech

So, I always struggle thinking of engaging ways for the students to practice identifying and brainstorming nouns, adjectives and verbs. I tried a new activity today that the kids enjoyed and I liked since it was student-centred and had them trying to think of less common "boring" words.

I showed this picture on the Smartboard. I am going to repeat this lesson with other "busy" pictures once in a while. Students were given a chart that was divided into nouns, adjectives and verbs. We brainstormed a few based on the pictures and they each had to record 5 of each type of word. Then they got to draw their own version of the picture once they were done. It's nice when they have background knowledge on parts of speech because now if they have an incomplete sentence, I can say "You're missing a verb!" Or, if their sentence is simplistic or boring I can say, "Why don't you add an adjective?"

Marking in the paperless classroom

I don't know about anyone else, but a majority of the work in my classroom takes place in an online environment. It is possible to do marking through Google Classroom, but it isn't always the most effective system. Enter Goobric and Doctopus. The best way to explain it is to walk through an example of what exactly these programs do. I have used it for the past few assignments I have done with students, and it has really streamlined the process! 

Step One: Assign students a writing (or any other) assignment through Google Classroom. Name it something practical and descriptive so it is easy to find! 


Step Two: Type up your rubric in Google Sheets

When you do this, it is important that you put your numbers along the top (and leave A1) blank, and put your criteria down the left-hand side. 

Step Three: Open up a new (Blank) Google Sheets document. 

I usually name it whatever the project name is and then add assessment at the end. This is where all your marks will be compiled 

Step Four: In your newly created document, you will need to run the add-on Doctopus.

• If you don't have it already, you can go to the add-ons tab, and go to get add-ons, and search for Doctopus. 
• If you have the add-on, you will need to launch it.

Step Five: Use Doctopus to ingest your assignment and select rubric

Step 1: Select "Ingest a Google Classroom Assignment"

Step Two: Select your class from classroom

Step Three: Choose your Assignment  

Once you have your class and assignment chosen, you will pick your rubric

Click on "Attach Goobric"

Select your rubric from Google Drive. Must be in Sheets! 

Step Six: Make sure you have the Goobric Extension (You only need to do this step the first time you do this)

Go to the Google Chrome Web Store, and search for Goobric. Or you can just click on this link to go Goobric Extension. The icon looks like this, and will appear with your other extensions

Step Seven: Find your students' assignments in your Google Classroom folder within Google Drive 

Click on the first assignment to open it up. Once you have it open, you must click on your Goobric extension. It will open up the same student document in a new tab

Step Eight: Assess student writing/work and give feedback

When your students work opens up through Goobric, it will look like the image below. You simply click on the rubric description that fits their work to select it.  You can add comments into the comment box, and you can also attach a voice comment using the microphone button. When you are done, you can click submit. It will automatically move you onto the next assignment. 

Step Nine: Check out your assessment data 

If you go back to that new document you created all the way back in step three, all of your students' rubric scores and comments will be compiled there for you to view and print. The rubric scores and comments automatically attach themselves to the end of the students' assignment. 

Pear Deck

I attended the Tech Innovation Conference from ERLC in Edmonton earlier this week, and one of the presenters used a website called Pear Deck to do his presentation. I had heard of it before, but hadn't really given it the time of day. However, after seeing his engaging presentation, I knew that I needed to give it a shot! 

Pear Deck is a platform that allows you to create slides to deliver information to your students, but the fun part is that you can add different types of questions to your presentation for students to answer as you go (multiple choice, long answer), and you can also add youtube videos right into your presentation. The best part is, you get students to join your presentation, and it plays it right on their devices for them to follow along. If you upgrade to premium,  it spits out a Google sheet with all of the students answers to the questions recorded in a handy spreadsheet when you are finished. 

My kids absolutely enjoyed a "boring" social lesson today because of this fun tool. I highly recommend checking it out!

Some of the slide options you have

It is as simple as typing your info in

You can see what your students will see on their screens using the student preview

Writing News Articles

A few times a year, our students are asked to write news articles.  They are asked to do this in response to literature,  about events happening around the school and as a school wide writing prompt.  All too often, we ask the kids to write the article, but don't really tell them how to do it beyond including the 5 Ws.

In recent years, we have found the kids have been more successful in grade six by using a structure for the articles.

The structure we use is as follows:

     First Paragraph: 

• A general overview, including all the 5 Ws.  
• You should get the general idea of the whole article from this.

     Detailed Paragraphs:  

• The paragraphs following the first paragraph are dedicated to giving more specific details on an element of the story.  
• It may be a paragraph that tells more about an event, character, location, etc.  For each specific area, there should be a specific paragraph.

     Quotes:  

• Students should then provide a quote that captures something important about the article. 
• The quote should be specific...not "it was fun!"

News articles are then assessed on the content of the article and content management.



Example:

The Trial of A. Wolf

This awesome lesson was created by Debbie Tchir-Houle, and it was too fun and amazing not to share with everyone! A huge shout-out goes to Deb for all of the hard work she put into setting up this activity, it was so comprehensive and well thought out!!

So here is the activity:
Using the book "The true Story of the 3 Little Pigs" by Jon Sciezska, students are witness in the trial of A.Wolf. They are asked to evaluate the evidence presented to arrive at either a guilty or innocent verdict for A. Wolf, who is accused of killing and eating 2 little pigs and attempting to kill the third. There are several exhibits from both the defence and prosecution that support either an innocent or guilty verdict. Students are shown all the evidence, and then left to arrive at a verdict based on what they seen and heard during the trial. 

I made a digital collection of the evidence (which is embedded below), but Deb has a physical collection as well that goes along with it! 

Here are some pictures of the evidence

When the students were finished, they had to go to their science blogs and explain their verdict, as well as their justification of why they decided he was either innocent or guilty. It was a nice tie between our evidence and investigation unit and language arts, where we just finished writing a news article about the Big Bad Wolf escaping from jail. Plus, it was a pretty fun science lesson!! 

Here are a few of our Blog posts:

http://taneshascienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trial-of-awolf.html

http://danielkscienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trail-of-wolf.html

http://kaydencescienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trial-of-awolf.html

Concept maps for Vocabulary

I'm in a really interesting course right now on connecting science and literacy in the classroom and I came across a useful good idea I thought I would share. By having students create a concept map in a small group to introduce a unit in science, you are able to engage them in meaningful discussion about the vocabulary they will be using during the unit of study. 

To do this activity, you simply print out a list of the vocabulary words that the students will be using during the unit and give each group a sheet. In small groups, you challenge them to arrange and glue the words on a blank sheet of paper based on the connections between them. They also need to write their own definition of the words as a group and use lines to connect words that are related in some way. Any words they are unsure about they use sticky tack to place on the side to connect in later. 

We did this activity today to introduce our evidence and investigation unit, and I couldn't believe how rich the dialogue was! Students were actually discussing the vocabulary and trying to work together to figure out what the words meant and how they could be connected together. For me, whose class is full of non-talkers, this was a big breakthrough! 

Here they are, working away! 

Technology and Literacy

These are some of the great resource ideas that were pooled together and talked about
during our Friday PD session!
Check out the links below

1) Scholastic Story Generator  - A generator that comes up with a prompt for some creative story writing. Teachers have the option of letting students type out a story in the program and also drawing a picture to go with it.

2) Trueflix - A site that lists categories in Science and Social studies each having many books per category. The books open up for fullscreen reading and the book can be read aloud to the students depending on whether they tag "Read on" or "off". 

3) Bookflix - Our third scholastic site that also has tons of books for students to read. Each book on the site can either be watched as a video, read aloud to them by a narrator, or simply read as is.
There are also resources listed at the top right of each book that include lesson plans and key words for ESL/ESD learners.

4) Black and Gold Div II - Math, LA, FLA, Science and Social studies from 4-6 are listed here, with a ton of resources to take from specific to Alberta Curriculum. It has tons of good projects and activities for the classroom as well as achievement indicators for each.

5) Readings A-Z - A website with another ton of books categories in 30 levels from aa to Z2. Each book is printable and project able. They also come with lessons with extensions for comprehension, phonemes, grammar and classroom discussion ideas.

6) Voice Note II - Available in the Chrome store free, this app allows students to record Speech to Text in a separate window.

7) Speakit - Another app but this one is the reverse, Text to Speech for those students that struggle to read independently or who may want to select a given word that he/she cannot pronounce. Once installed through your students google account, a small speaker will appear on the right side of the URL bar. They may select text and press the speaker button to have it read to them.

Thank you Tech group!

Getting more from Google

On Friday I am venturing to Wainwright (I think...) to present on some Google stuff at a PD day there, but I thought I would share my slides for the presentation in case anyone can steal any ideas. It includes a lot of different project ideas that you can do using Slides and Docs in the classroom. 

Adventures in Math Centers

Since working with Jackie, Carol and I have started on an quest to do weekly math centers with our grade sixes. Each week, we try hard to include a variety of centers, such as a building center, a technology center, a game, etc. We also try to have activities that are differentiated to help meet the needs of all of our learners. The kids have really enjoyed this change in pace, and it has also allowed us to  review concepts we might have worked on earlier in the year in a fun setting. 

We realized that if we wanted our centers to be good year after year, we would need to be organized and keep a record of the centers we were doing for each of the different strands and outcomes. In order to do this, we have created a website that houses all of our resources. Hopefully this will help us create a huge collection of awesome activities and centers that we can use year after year! If you want to check out our site, you can click on the image below to visit our site. We are still doing some tweaking to how it is organized, but slowly we will get it to how we like it.