12th Teaching K-6 Carnival

Welcome to the January 2010 edition of the Teaching K-6 Carnival. This edition marks the start of the second year of this carnival. As we head into 2010 we look forward to another year of learning filled with inspiration, collaboration, and challenges.

Brain Strain

Allison Johanson presents a great read for those teachers on vacation who are looking for ways to keep their minds active. You may also find some useful ideas for the classroom in her 55 Tips to Instantly Make Your Brain Stronger and Faster posted at Masters in Health Informatics.

Nightwalker explains Content-Based Instruction – A Cognitive Approach in his post at My English Pages. This is a good introduction as a starting point to learning and applying content-based instruction.

Gripes and Brags

Mimi shares her passion for children's books and tells us about a close encounter with the author type in Warning: People In Mirror May Not Be As Fabulous As They Appear posted at It's Not All Flowers and Sausages. If you haven't discovered her blog yet, don't hold off any longer - it's a winner.

In the News

Keira presents Why Should Kids Read Newspapers? posted at Literature Young Adult Fiction, saying, "Reading the newspaper is a great way to encourage reading habits and teach skills."

Innovate - Beyond the Slate

Rachel Lynette of Minds in Bloom gives us a great list of ideas to help us Get out of that Rut! These suggestions help to shake things up in the classroom to prevent boredom setting in.

Tom DeRosa presents Use a Deck of Cards to Set Your Child Up For Future Math Success posted at I Want to Teach Forever. These simple suggestions help students to develop skills with sorting and counting and pave the way for more difficult concepts.

MG presents ideas on Teaching our kids to save. posted at Personalize Baby. Why not use this suggestion to inspire an art project to make personalised piggy banks that students can fill at home?

At A Reader's Community, M Dahms presents an answer to the question What is Reader's Workshop? Here you can find all you need to get started and keep going with Reader's Workshops.

Elementaryhistoryteacher presents Bespoken Blacksmiths posted at History Is Elementary. This post helps us to think more about the importance of teaching subject specific vocabulary, and also helps us to understand the context of blacksmithing.

Vera Lang presents How to Knit Christmas Tree Ornaments posted at Fine Craft Guild .com. While a little late for this year, these may come in handy for 2010. "These little Christmas tree ornaments are so easy that kids could make them as presents for their family home. Great seasonal projects. Free patterns, illustrations and craft tips provides."

Why not submit your post for the next carnival?

The Teaching K-6 Carnival is posted monthly on the 7th. I will be collecting submissions throughout the next month, looking in particular for posts that discuss and exemplify innovative teaching and the integration of technology in the K-6 classroom. I also invite some discussion around education related news articles and a few "brain strains" to keep our minds alert and challenged. Please submit only articles of which you are the author and refrain from using this merely as a sales pitch. For full details, please read my call for submissions.

If you have a relevant post that you would like to submit to the next edition of Teaching K-6 Carnival use our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Literacy Unit - Rowan of Rin

This week we began a novel study on the book Rowan of Rin by Emily Rodda. This is an adventure story that usually appeals to boys aged 9-12 and can be that motivator that hooks them into reading. Emily Rodda is brilliant at crafting stories that appeal to reluctant readers. Another of hers that I love is Finders Keepers.
I'm going to keep a record here of the activities we do with each chapter. I have been using the Four Roles of the Reader to develop these activities. Feel free to use and/or modify these ideas with your students.

For the complete Rowan of Rin unit (in reverse order!) click here.

Chapters 1 and 2 - Summary
In these chapters we meet the characters and find out that the village Rin is in trouble. The stream from the mountain has stopped running and the bukshah have no water. The bukshah provide dairy, wool and transport to the people of Rin. Without the bukshah, Rin will die. The town meets to develop a plan. It is decided that someone needs to go up the mountain to find out what is blocking the stream. Strong Jonn, Marlie and Rowan consult Sheba (the village's Wise Woman) to get advice about the best way to approach the mountain. Sheba tells them a riddle that they don't understand and throws a stick at Rowan.

Activities
Code Breaker

• Work on developing reading fluency with the first three paragraphs.
• Highlight nouns in this passage. Convert singular nouns to plural eg. morning - mornings

Text Participant

• Create a diary entry from the viewpoint of Rowan
• Create a newspaper article about the first chapter. Edit and publish. Insert text into this newspaper generator to create a newspaper clipping.
• Create a cause and effect diagram for the first chapter. (We used Kidspiration.)

Text User

• Discuss features of a first chapter in a Narrative. It needs to create interest and capture the reader. It introduces the problem that the characters need to solve. (To aid discussion we watched snippets from The Simpsons episode 8 of 18, where Homer gets hooked into a "Harry Potter" parody).

Text Analyst

• Take a closer look at ideas about witches and debate whether Sheba is a witch or just a crabby old woman. We used the following PowerPoint slideshow to guide the discussion. Students had 2 minutes to individually brainstorm a list of adjectives to describe witches. We then made a class list on the PowerPoint presentation. After discussion about where these ideas came from, we read the scene with Sheba and considered her witchiness. Students discussed their opinion and then we did "Lay it on the Line". Students who thought Sheba was a witch stood at one end of the line. Students who thought she was just a crabby old woman stood at the opposite end. Students who thought something in the middle lined up accordingly. We then got a couple of spokespeople to share the logic behind their thinking. There were some really well formed arguments based on examples from the text.

2014 Update: Having just taught this section of the book again, I added a Padlet page for students to share their thoughts about whether or not Sheba is a witch. Feel free to have students contribute responsibly.

Witches

View more presentations from pennyryder. (tags: rowan_of_rin critical_literacy)

Friday Fun - 14/2/09

Olympic Visitor
We had Beijing 1500m runner, Lisa Corrigan visit our school on Monday to talk to the students about her experiences as a runner and to promote the Kids' Marathon in April. She taught us some pre-run exercises and stretches. Fran, who is involved with our local marathon showed us an Olympic Torch from the Sydney Olympics when she was selected to be part of the torch relay. Then we all went out on the school oval to run a lap behind Lisa. A number of kids have taken applications for the Kids' Marathon, demonstrating an interest in participating in this event.

Come Back Gizmo
We have been reading Paul Jennings' Come Back Gizmo. We finished it on Monday afternoon and then did a related creative writing task on Tuesday. Together we created a mind map in Kidspiration to consider ideas for writing.

Cricket
Jonathan and I split the group into a girls group and a boys group for cricket games. The girls played French Cricket with me and the boys played 3-wicket cricket with Jonathan.

Spelling
We started our spelling groups this week. We used a Spelling Inventory to determine word families/patterns that students need to learn. Jonno worked out list words for each of these groups and activities for students to work on to practice their spelling further. I set up the list words in Spelling City for my early finishers to work with. This was recommended to us on Mr Hancock's Class Blog.

Maths
I am trying out Smart Kiddies for interactive whiteboard activities to supplement my lessons. So far it seems to be working well. Teachers can register for free and use the resources in the classroom. This week we used activities from the Place Value and Number Patterns sections. We also used Molecule Maths from Fiery Ideas to practise ordering numbers from lowest to highest. Early finishers then used these chains to practise adding.

Newspapers
In Australia we are going through the aftermath of some terrible fires. This week we looked at newspaper articles about the fires. We looked at keywords in these articles and sought out the who, what, when and where of the stories before writing a summary sentence. We looked at what came up when the text was inserted into Wordle.
We read a Daily Telegraph feature about newspapers, then watched a video about the process behind making a newspaper. Students then found an article in the paper and labelled the headline, picture, caption, first paragraph (including who, what, when and where), quotes, writer and photographer (if given). Early finishers then wrote a summary sentence about the article they chose.

Singing
The jump from Year 1 to Year 4 has been tricky for me in terms of attention gaining tools and transition activities. In the past I clapped rhythms to get students to stop work and look my way. I'm not sure if it's too babyish for Year 4s! I also sang with students during transition time to avoid chaos, but all my songs were for younger children.
This week I borrowed a Sing CD from the library and started teaching the kids some new songs. We are really enjoying the Shoo Fly/ Get that fly! Medley. I can't seem to get it out of my head!

Reflective Journals
On Fridays students write an entry in their reflective journals. They consider their challenges and successes during the week and write their plans for the next week. We are really encouraging our students to be more reflective and to take charge of their own learning and growth.