6th Teaching K-6 Carnival

Welcome to the June edition of the Teaching K-6 Blog Carnival. The weather is getting colder now, here in Australia, and we're looking for opportunities to cuddle up by the heater with our laptops and search for some good reads. This month offers some great tips for those of us trying to make it through the cold of winter AND also for those in the Northern Hemisphere who are finishing off the school year and preparing for the summer months. This month we have a special category: "Taking it Home", for posts about extending learning into the home.

Brain Strain

As my regular readers are aware, I have been busy working on a Graduate Certificate in Educational Leadership. My contribution to the carnival this month is my post about the Microsoft Innovative Schools Conference that I attended in early May. Check out some of the links and watch some of the recordings - they're well worth it.

Taking it Home

For those in the Northern Hemisphere who are putting together Summer Packets of work for students to work through during the holidays, you might like to use the suggestions from Meaghan Montrose at TutorFi.com this month. They also make great homework supplements for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere.

• 5 Ways to Encourage Young Children to Read
• 10 Tips to Improve Your Math Skills Everyday
  

In her post Free Tutoring posted at Note from the Teacher, Erin shares tips for parents about ways they can support their children with learning at home. Erin provides practical examples that provide for a more consistent approach to consolidating new learning.

Gripes and Brags

Glowing Face Man presents Teaching With Pronouns posted at Awaken the Badass Within, saying, "An article about why you should make a conscious effort to use less pronouns when teaching."After reading this, I know I'll be paying more attention to my use of pronouns this week!

In the News

In "Hell is the classroom"nightwalker of My English Pages presents some strategies for creating a respectful classroom environment. He emphasises the need to have a preventative approach and outlines how this can be done by teaching with "love and logic".

This month Fiona Lohrenz presents the following two posts at Child Care Only to guide you through Child Care management:

• Guidelines For Preparing A Day Care Safety Statement
• Preparing For Day Care Toileting Accidents

Innovate - Beyond the Slate

At the Teacher's Desk Wm Chamberlain presents Allowing Students to Differentiate with Vocabulary Strategies. Here he and his students share strategies they find useful for learning vocabulary in reading. See how Wm Chamberlain differentiates to meet the needs and hear the students explain for themselves.

Myscha Theriault has got it right when she says that we need the right amount of spelling activities to provide students with variety but at the same time familiarity. This month she shares Spelling Activities: Twenty-Seven Ways to Practice in Style posted at The Lesson Machine Blogazine. She gets the balance right and her ideas can be applied in the classroom with minimal prior preparation.

Mathew Needleman presents Open House Parent Engagement Tips posted at Open Court Resources.com Blog. These tips will help you to think through the reasons parents come to Open House and consider the best way to hold their interest.

Look No Further

R. Garza presents "A remarkable collection of cutting edge resources for parents and teachers." with 41 Things To Do With Your Kids This Summer‎ posted at Educational Games for Children.

Why not submit your post for the next carnival?

The Teaching K-6 Carnival is posted monthly on the 7th. I am collecting submissions throughout the 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 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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Friday Fun - 27/2/09

Fun This Week
This week we had minimal interruptions to normal teaching time. It was nice to have things running to schedule, but was by no means boring!

Alligator in the Classroom!
We have been encouraging students to take charge of their learning, exercise their brains and share their knowledge. One student was a great example of that this week. On the weekend she purchased a cracking egg toy with an 'alligator' inside. When put into water the alligator starts to grow and begins cracking out of its shell. She brought it into school to share the experience with us. Everyone is very excited to check it out in the morning to see how much it has grown.

Maths
We looked at different strategies for working out the five times tables. We talked about how it's easy to count by fives to work out the lower tables eg. 3 x 5. For the bigger numbers we tried multiplying by 10 and then halving the answer. For example: 8 x 5 becomes 8 x 10 (80) halved (40). I found that this is a good strategy in theory, but students need to be confident with doubling and halving larger numbers first.
We also worked with data collection and graphing this week. We explored different types of surveys and the types of information they are able to gather. We looked at how Venn diagrams can be used to collect and sort information. This first diagram shows student preferences when asked "Do you like going on the internet and/or playing computer games?"

This second diagram shows student preferences when asked "Do you like chocolate, strawberry, and/or plain milk?" Readers' Theatre
While some of our students were doing Fife and Drum lessons, the others did Readers' Theatre. Students read and performed "Spider Woman and the Gift of the Loom" from a resource book full of Readers' Theatre plays. We will be doing one each week in the hopes of improving student reading fluency and expression. I would like to see students performing radio plays at some stage, and would also like for students to write some scripts of their own.

Respect
We focused on 'respect' this week in our FRIENDS values program. We looked at examples of respect/disrespect in both a comic and a picture book ("Zen Ties" by John M. Muth). Students thought about why respect is important and wrote about how they show respect to others. We also performed roleplays where students responded to scenarios assertively, but not agressively.
SuperClubsPlus
We have been busy registering our students for SuperClubsPlus and some have been able to get on already and have a play. It's amazing to see how much they've been able to do at home without teacher instruction. They seem to be loving it so far and one student commented that it brings students together who wouldn't ordinarily talk at school.
On Friday we had a session with SCP in the computer lab. One of the year 5 students who really knows her way around SuperClubs came to talk to the group about what she's learned with it. She really inspired them and was a great support to them as they got started.

House Meetings
Our Swimming Carnival is only a couple of weeks away so students met in their house teams to elect house captains. The air was buzzing with excitement. It's always great to see how things like this bring students together and build school spirit.

Rowan of Rin
I will write a separate post about "Rowan of Rin" over the weekend.

Dealing with Conflict

This week I read a post on Successful Teaching about teaching students social skills. I have been working with my students on dealing with conflict. I am trying to train them to work through their problems independently. I stand by to mediate, and then at the end check that both parties are happy with how the situation has been dealt with.

I taught my students this basic script:
1. Tell the person how you felt when they did what they did.
eg. "When you pushed me I felt annoyed and it hurt my arm"
2. Tell the person that it was disrespectful:
eg. "It was disrespectful"
3. Tell the person what you would like to see happen in order to move forward.
eg. "I'd like you to say 'sorry' and not push me again"

At this point, it is up to the 'offender' to respond with apology and/or appropriate action as suggested by the 'offended'. I often find that students will then turn the tables with the 'offender' describing how they have been offended.

For the most part, students in my class can now work through this quite well on their own. I do, however, step in when one party refuses to listen, acknowledge the impact of their behaviour, or responds aggressively to the discussion.

This strategy is based loosely on Restorative Practices - Corridor Questions, but I am trying to get my students to own the resolution rather than having to guide them through questions step by step.

Early Childhood Australia Conference

I found out about this conference quite early in the school term and thought it would be a good one to go to. Teaching Year 1 puts me in the "Early Childhood" category, so I figured I could probably learn some great new strategies.

I was surprised to discover how many people attended - I didn't expect it to be so large. I'd be interested to know exact numbers, but I guestimate it to be about 1000. (Which is big compared to other conferences I've been to).

I don't know how I could have failed to realise that the largest proportion of people would be from childcare agencies. I struggled to find anyone else from the Primary School sector, and only saw departmental staff from my own system. They were there to present a workshop.

I felt a bit out of place for most of the day, and had to try to relate the things I was hearing to my own situation, but on the whole, I did pick up a few things.

Ferre Laevers and Julia Moons talked about Emotional Wellbeing - how to recognise it and how it can be monitored through observational checklists over time. This was an interesting idea to me, as I have never thought of keeping records of students' emotional wellbeing and involvement with others. Here is a copy of the manual.
Ferre also shed new light on how to really respect children. He told the story of one little boy chasing another little boy with a tiger mask covering his face. The boy being chased was visibly scared. Ferre talked about how he took the little boy onto his lap and talked to him about his fear. He acknowledged the feelings and worked it through with the boy. Too often we adults dismiss the fear with comments such as "There's no need to be scared! It's only a mask!" I hope I can take this insight into my own dealings with children.

Some of the workshops I attended related to leadership and team building. I don't see myself as a "lead from above" sort of person. I'd rather be a "support alongside" sort of person. But, as I reach the top of my "rung in the ladder" I am considering how I can stretch myself further. One of the big messages that kept coming up for me was about relationships. Enriching relationships with the kids, with other teachers and with parents. It's one of those commonsense things that sounds amazing in theory, but takes a lot of time and energy in practice.

The final session I attended was about the care of infants (0-2 years). Now, I must admit, I actually went to this session more out of personal interest for my possible future plans than for the benefit of my class or school! One of the presenters discussed the RIE approach in some detail. According to the website "the RIE Approach helps raise authentic infants who are competent, confident, curious, attentive, exploring, cooperative, secure, peaceful, focused, self-initiating, resourceful, involved, inner-directed, aware and interested." Sounds good to me!
The things that I took from this approach were to really engage with the child in uninterrupted time. Talk to the baby, don't just assume it can't understand you. Unfortunately I didn't get down who said it, but someone clever said "What they can do is not valued. What they can't do is expected." I know I will be looking some more into this approach if I'm ever lucky enough to be a mum.

One other cool thing I wanted to share from the day, there's this guy in New Zealand who makes cool stuff for kids to play with - fancy blocks and magnetic water play equipment. Here's a link to his website - Kidantics.

Compliments to Strengthen the Heart

Earlier in the week, I did a lesson on "looking after other people". I followed this up by having my students work on complimenting one another. I photocopied an A3 heart, divided into 20 spaces (one for each of the kids in my class and for me to write a compliment in). After talking about some of the things we could write to build one another up, I set my students free to roam the room and write their compliments. We probably had about 20 minutes, and did not quite complete all compliments for all students. I think another 20 minute session will finish it off.

It was interesting to hear the comments that students made as they went around the room. Some, of course, got caught up in counting how many comments they had! But, most were really engaged in leaving compliments for others. I found that my students were quite interested in reading the compliments that I left. I think that they will learn more about how to compliment by seeing how others do it.

One little boy came running up to me after reading my compliment and asked, "How do YOU know that I am imaginative?" I laughed and told him that I see it in his artwork and in his writing. He confirmed it and told me that he is also very imaginative at home.

I really enjoyed this activity as it also gave me the opportunity to remember all the special things about these kids and to verbalise it to them. Too often I will think all the good things about them, but forget to tell them!

Teaching Morality

Here's an interesting idea to discuss: How do we teach morality in a government school? In recent years, schools have been taking on more and more responsibility when it comes to teaching children social skills. Many programs have been developed with this particular goal in mind.

Some parents of children in my class have come to me at a loss as to how to deal with children stealing, or playing inappropriately. As a teacher, I don't always feel competent to help them with their concerns. I know how my parents brought me up, but I was brought up with Christian values and the Bible as a guide. And this advice doesn't work for people from other beliefs. I know how I try to deal with things in my classroom, when they arise, but I feel that this really is an area where parents could be carrying the load.

I have been trying to teach my students more about the meaning of 'respect' over the past couple of weeks. We read a book about respect. We filled out a Y chart of what it looks like, sounds like and feels like. We made posters for our classroom to show how to respect our classroom environment. We made a book of how to respect others in our classroom. I've been using the word throughout the day and rewarding 'respectful' students with stickers and computer time. I've been reminding students if their behaviour is disrespectful. But it seems that all this talk and all this thinking through and planning has had little effect on how the students are behaving. Well...maybe that is unfair. There have been some changes - the classroom is being left much tidier. And it has been a while since someone actually told me that they thought my lesson was boring or refused to join in.

I guess I'm hoping to see some more evidence of respect in terms of how the children treat one another. Maybe that is an area that just requires more training...or more time.

Please leave a comment to let me know how you deal with the challenge of teaching morality.

(Photo by Trois Tetes on Flickr - some rights reserved)