Dad's Balls

Conversation this morning as we were coming into the school:

Student: Mrs. Ackroyd, you know my dad's balls?

Me: Pardon?

Student: You know.....my dad's balls?

Me: okay.... (Thinking: oh dear....where is this going?)

Student: He used to have LOTS of hair!

Me: OH!! Your dad's bald!!!

Super Powers of Mothers

We brainstormed Super powers that mothers have. It was quite entertaining!

(Excuse the nasty cardboard we wrote on..We ran out of paper on our pad!)

Expediting Learning With Technology

Today we worked on solving riddles* with number lines. This was the riddle today:

A messenger pigeon flies 3 km in an hour.

How long will it take this pigeon to carry a letter to a person who lives 21 km away from the sender?

The pigeon sets out at 1:00 pm. When will it reach the addressee?  

I have been trying to find ways for students to find errors. This problem was tricky for us. Some students said the pigeon would arrive at 6:00, some said 7:00 and others said 8:00.

I took a picture with my iPad of the work with students who got different answers. I projected the pictures on the SMART board and had students talk with their shoulder partner about where the student went wrong.

The discussions were amazing! 

*(We have taken to calling word problems riddles. It is much more fun that way!)

Danger! No Reading!

Well, books are rather pokey. They could be dangerous. (/sarcasm off)



An eight-year-old girl in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que. was told she's no longer allowed to read books on the school bus because it poses a risk to the safety of other students.
​Sarah Auger loves reading and used to enjoy using her 20-minute ride to and from school to read for pleasure.
But recently, her bus driver told her she had to stop.
She says she was told reading posed a risk to other students on the bus.
He suggested they might stand up to see what she was reading, or she might poke herself in the eye with the corners of the book.

Father wants rule changed

The no-reading rule is not sitting well with her father, Daniel Abel.
Abel says he's proud of his daughter for loving to read, and wants to encourage her to do so as often as possible.
He wants to see the rule on her school bus change.
"I find it stupid and useless," he said.
Abel complained to the school board, which deferred to the driver, saying the person who drives the bus is allowed to make the rules.
"The responsibility of a school bus driver is to transport students safely," said Mario Champagne, general secretary and director of communications for the Hautes-Rivière school board.
In a statement, the board concedes that "obviously" reading is not dangerous.
The statement also specified that personal belongings of students, including books, must stay in their bags during the duration of their trip home.

So focused!

Can we skip science and keep writing?

If only I could figure out what prompted this love for writing!

Morning Supervision Conversations

I love being on supervision in the mornings. The things kids say are hilarious. One of the more interesting conversations this morning:

Student: Mrs. Ackroyd, my back is really sore.

 Me: Oh dear. Why?

 Student: I cast a spell on myself to grow wings. I think it's working.

Fridays: Reading Response

I love Fridays. That's when we write about what we've been reading all week.

My students are getting better and better at writing about what they've been reading. One of the turning points was when I started doing the same thing. I first share a post about what I've been reading that week.  It has made all the difference in improving how they talk about what they've been reading.

Go figure.

Choice in Reading

Others at my school grapple with teaching reading just as I do. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and trying to plan ways to get my students excited about reading and turn them into life long readers.

Donalyn Miller says, “Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books and become readers, they may never read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them." ~ pg. 177”
― Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

Others say carefully selected texts read in a "close reading" style is important.

What's a teacher to do? I tend to think a balanance of each is key.

My students who struggle seem to do better with guided, close reading experiences.

They are also the ones who don't always choose to read on their own.

Is that because I'm not giving them choice? Or is that because they still need to strengthen their skills so they can enjoy independent reading well?

This is one of my more dedicated readers. Notice the book in his desk? We were reading a story all together from our anthology. He wasn't that interested in it, (Frankly, nor was I.) I tried to snap a pic of him reading it inside his desk - but he was pretty aware I was watching him. Just that says a lot! :)

 

He had a book hidden in his desk that he was trying to read while we read a class story.

 

As soon as he was finished the computer work we did about the story he was quick to pull out his book and get to reading something he wanted to read.

 

 

My dilemma...

How much choice to give?

Are group reads valuable?

How do I balance it?

Geoboard Apps

I know manipulatives are important. I really should use them more in math.

Do you know the madness of it though?!

Little plastic shapes on the floor, on the desks, everywhere!!

Ta gram pieces missing. Who's missing a rhombus?! Who!

Broken elastics on geoboards. Snap! Owwwww!

We are not playing with lego. We are showing tens and ones.

Sometimes I just can't take it and back to pencil and paper we go.

Today we we're supposed to use geoboards. I remembered that we had an app for that. What a difference it made!! The kids were really keen to use them. I didn't even show them how to use the app. They played around and figured it out quickly. They had a challenge question to solve. I quickly showed them how to take a screen shot and airdrop their solution to me. 

It was amazing! 

Yea for technology! It makes life better, for sure.

The challenge we were trying to solve was to make a bigger triangle out of two triangles and a square. We couldn't do it with flat shapes yesterday - but we figured it out on the geoboards today!

nope. Not quite right.

Uh, you have to use elastics, not draw.

You got it!!

Another answer!