SJEDS- Professional Development

Hi everyone!

Rebecca, Victoria, Lisa, Christy and I all attended The Successful Literacy Centers for Differentiated Learning presented by Christine Sowada.  Christine’s website

The first thing I notice is the overhead projector!  In this day and age?!?  I am guessing this will not be high tech!

What is a center?  A small area of your classroom where one or more students work independently on an activity or activities.  It is an activity that introduces, reinforces, or extends a skill or topic of your curriculum.  Most commonly the centers are around the perimeter of the classroom.  While there is nothing wrong with that, it limits what you can do.  We also struggle with the children working independently, they always have questions.  Also we tend to use them to reinforce a concept that we have already presented.  We should also use them to challenge our brighter students and help our children who are struggling.  So in the end, why should we have centers??  To teach the kids to work together and to be independent.  It gives the teacher time to spend with small groups of students on specific skills.

Now for the difficulties.  How do you create many activities for each week?  How to create learning centers for differentiated learning?  How to organize the centers?  How to keep the learning centers independent so the student can complete the actives with minimal help?  How to make smooth transitions between centers?  How to assign  centers to students?  How to keep a record of activities completed by students?  How to maintain order at the centers?  How to create centers that can be completed in a determined amount of time?

So here is the plan:  learning stations.  A learning station is an area of your classroom that includes several learning centers.  Students are assigned a learning station and must remain in that station until a determined amount of time set by the teacher.  Students move from station to station in small groups.  Each station may include:  daily required assignment, optional center or senters and on-going activity.  This idea helps keep the kids in one area for a longer period of time and keeps them from bouncing around the classroom too much.

The first step is to divide your classroom into areas - one for each of your stations.  The number of stations you decide on is determined by how long your students will spend in stations each day and by how much you hope to teach or reinforce in the stations.  It really becomes personal preference and what works for you.Maybe you only want to have 4 stations and each child will to go each station during the course of the week.  This gives you a day to introduce concepts that the children will need during the week in stations.  The minimum amount of time a group should stay in a station is 30minutes and the max should be around an hour and 15 minutes.   One center must be with you, the teacher.  This is the time when you go over what the kids will see next week in their stations.  This is most important with the younger kids.  You need to make sure that they know the directions and concepts so they can work independently in the other stations.

I think the station idea is a good idea.  It limits movement during the course of the center time.  I do think that her center ideas, the actual activities she showed us how to make are outdated.  The children in my classroom would not stay engaged for very long with file folder games and other home made activities.

Kathy

National Council of Teacher’s of English
November 29 – 22, 2009

Attended the following sessions:
Out Loud and In Your Face – session about slam poetry
Beyond the Poetry Unit – presented ideas on how to do a poetry unit
Picture Books – excellent session - this highlighted specific picture books and showed lessons to go with them. This was for all grade levels
Jeff Kinney – author of the Wimpy Kid series did a talk
Summer Reading – a discussion group on what other schools are doing for summer reading and what has been successful and what has not
Engaging Readers – new ways to engage students and activate prior knowledge
Podcasting – what they are doing in the Philadelphia public schools with podcasting
Graphic Novels – presented along with Katie Monnin, Ph.D. from UNF

Victoria, Elizabeth, Brandon and I have been attending this conference since Wednesday afternoon. What can I say? Well whatever I say right now is probably going to sound a bit like ‘gobbledy goop’ as, I think I can speak for all that, this has been an amazing, awe inspiring, yet brain overloading event. It is now almost 3:30 on Friday and we are in the last sessions. I have made my first mistake in my choice of sessions as this is not my ‘cup of tea’! It could be a welcome break for my head as it is full of all kinds of cool stuff. Can’t wait to share when we get back to school on Tuesday and in the meantime here is the link to FETC so that you can see a taste of things we have experienced. KB
http://www.fetc.org/

Hello everyone!

I am currently hanging out with Silvia, Paige, and Victoria at the Jewish Day School for the 2nd annual K12 Online Conference LAN Party.  Last year SJEDS hosted this same event.  We are watching  The presentation Little Kids, Big Possibilities by Kelly Hines.   Kelly talks about many different Web 2.0 tools that a teacher can use with students under the age of 13.  One of my favorite is www.wordle.net.  You can type in lots of different words and it will create a graphic.  For my kindergarten students we use it as a fun way to practice sounding out cvc words and sight words.  You could also use it as an intro into a new unit.  For example, we are going to begin studying the country of Japan.  I could create a Wordle with words about Japan.  Then I could ask the children to read the words and think about what country we are going to begin studying.

Comic Creators is another site that would be fun for kids to use.  You can create your own comic strip.  You could use this to assess if the kids know all the different types of sentences.  This is a little old for my kindergartners, this would be useful for 2nd grade and up.

We are now going to have the opportunity to skype with Kelly Hines.

The consensus in the room is that this is a good way to present professional development.  You can go back and re-listen to a presentation when you miss something.  Also when there is something you want to try, you can pause the presentation, go and try the new website, and then come back and continue.

If you get time, log on and see what you can learn!  Kathy

Bill Stewart made a list of math links for anyone to view:
www.mathforum.com
www.coolmath.com
www.mathcats.com
www.funbrain.com/numbers
www.mathplayground.com
www.education.com
www.aaamath.com
Hope you enjoy them!!!

Greenwood School - the focus of this conference was on different modalities of learning geared toward the child with ADHD.  We  learned that movement throughout the day stimulates the brain and helps all children focus better.  We have implemented movement  in our class through song and dance activites related to our subject matter - ex. we sing and march to “who let the letters out” to learn our sounds.  Also, we learned about techniques and accomodations for those with learning deficits such as T stools, hand squeeze toys, donut pillows and other tools that can help children achieve better focus.  

Ann Poelker - JCA - This was a music and the brain conference.  Music stimulates the brain and increases learning.  Ann has many songs for young children.  We have used her CD and implemented several of her songs in our class.  The favorite was the “Fireman” song.  We made firehoses out of painted wrapping paper tubes with gold solo cups attached to the end as the nozzle and strips of laminate coming out of the nozzle to represent water.  The kids loved acting out firemen by sliding down a pretend  pole, putting on boots, driving a firetruck and then using their hoses to put out the fires.

Beaches Episcopal - This conference involved sharing math ideas with other schools.  I came away with several great  suggestions.  One suggestion that I will be implementing after Christmas is using money to go to the treasure box instead of jewels.  Every day of good behavior will earn one penny instead of a jewel; exemplary behavior earns 2 pennies.  When a child has 5 pennies he/she will trade for a nickle and when he/she has earned a nickle and 5 pennies he/she will trade for a dime and a trip to the treasure box.    I will clean and soak the money before we start.  The children will learn the value of coins and relating  money to effort.  I think this is a great idea because its something we are already doing it but it can be transformed into a money lesson.  

Another thing I liked was magnetic gel boards which another kindergarten teacher showed us: a magnetic pen is used to write and then you rub the board with your hand to erase so it is not messy and the kids would love it.  I researched these on the internet at imaginetics.com and they are about 8-9 dollars a board for the large size - expensive, however, if used for a center not as many would be needed.

We also spoke about how it is important to involve parents in a childs math development.  This was a great reminder since we had conferences a few days later and when parents asked how they could help, we had great answers.  A child can weigh fruit on the scale at Publix or he/she  can count the change at a restaurant.  They can read signs and find shapes while driving in the car - all of these require little time and effort but can help the child see the value of math (and language) in everyday life.

Our ELC team attended a math workshop at Beaches Episcopal School to learn how to use different strategies and techniques when teaching math to your students. Bill Stewart who lead the workshop did a great job letting teachers from different schools share successful ideas and projects they have used in their classroom. We also discussed how we could get parents involved at home to help their child with math through cooking, taking trips to the grocery store, or even just counting road signs while driving. Bill gave each teacher a list of fun websites to let your students work on in the classrom and home. This workshop was a fun way to learn more effective “hands-on” math strategies than just using worksheets. I enjoyed the worshop and interacting with other teachers.

This conference was very informative and it was really nice to be able to share ideas with teachers from other schools.  We shared ideas and saw other tools they were using to make learning about Math fun!  We also talked about how we can interest the parent in teaching math at home with their children.  There are so many simple ways to incorporate math into our everyday world.  Little things like counting stop signs, or counting steps as we are walking up and down them.  There was a suggestion to purchase a DVD/Book called 123 Magic and it talks about teaching math in the classroom for teachers and at home for parents.  I definitely think this was a beneficial conference for all.