This week's news!

I hope everyone had a great weekend and enjoyed the last bit of summer weather.  My MacBook charger is in two pieces and Amazon isn't saving me until tomorrow.  So this blog post will have to work for this week's news!

A few things to go over.  It was a hot one last week and I won't lie.  This happened......

We really needed a cool down and time to rehydrate so a Science movie it was.

I assumed everyone knew about eSpark because it was utilized last year.  However, I am realizing that some parents might not know.  Also, we seem to utilize it differently in my classroom.  eSpark is a program we use for math and reading.  Each child works individually on a "quest" that is based on their current learning level and pertains to a specific content standard. Students will take a pre-quiz and post-quiz before completing the quest.  In between these two, eSpark loads a specific videos and apps for each student that correlates with the standard they are working on.  The final part of a quest is the best part in my opinion.  The students need to create a video that reteaches the concept they have been working on.

I am able to see what apps the students are on, if they are logged in, how they responded on their quizzes, the videos they submit, etc.  eSpark does all the work on researching the apps and videos as well as making sure they are of high quality.  Frankly, with the help of this program we have taken our classroom technology from tools of productivity to creativity.

Lastly, we took our NWEA today, finally! There were some technical difficulty's on NWEA's end that prevented us from completing the Reading portion last week.  I know there is a lot of hype about the stress that standardized tests create.  Looks terribly stressful, lol ;)

Coding!

On Wednesday afternoons, we work on coding.  Each lesson begins with whole group instruction going over techniques and vocabulary.  The students are learning about programs, code, sequences, bugs and debugging. Next there is an individual activity that each child completes.  The students individually work through each level, developing a code to help the Fuzz make it to his destination.    After we master these skills, we will be able to start working with our robots, Dot and Dash.

This is a great activity to teach problem solving.  The students do not get the correct code right away.  They fail.  They get frustrated.  Yet, they always figure it out.  Their first reaction is to come directly to me and say I can't do it.  They just have to keep trying, focus on the problem and boom! They write the code.

This week's news!

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The STEM Lab

The STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) lab was pretty fun today!  The kids worked in groups of 4 to complete the Cup Stacking Challenge.  Ask your child about!

This week's news!

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Genius Hour!

Today we started something completely new in the classroom.  Both the children and I are learning as we go.  The concept of Genius Hour has been mentioned in almost every professional development that I attend.  So I finally decided to give it a whirl and if today was a measure, I would say it is a great fit for our classroom.

So what is Genius Hour?

Click here to find out!

So what does this look like in our classroom?

Well, today it looked like children playing on iPads and everyone very excited about it.  We actually decided we were going to do our first project today and focus on an animal.  This first project will be done as a whole class and we will not necessarily be solving any of the wonders of the world.  I wanted the children to feel comfortable with the process first.   We narrowed down our focus to sharks.  We then used the kid safe search engine KidRex.

The children were able to tell me MANY things that they learned from just this short time researching.  We will continue next week, collecting information and then organizing it.  After this project, we will be able to work on our own and pick our own "wonder." Stay tuned!

This week's news!

Here is the link to the first newsletter of the year!  To view, please click on the link BELOW the picture :)

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