With first grade this week, I focused on beginning to teach the children how to read a website. We talked about how websites have an "address" (we called it a "URL") just like they do, and that a web address won't actually take them to a live page online unless they enter it correctly.
We practiced with the website www.southernbellefarm.com since they have a field trip to the Southern Belle Farm in McDonough next week. From the farm website, we talked about reading headings and recognizing the navigation bar and links. We found the link called "school field trips," and read through what they could expect as part of their fall field trip. I know they are looking forward to it, and I sure wish I could go with them!
To get the children thinking about farms, our activity this week involved making a modified K-W-L using Doozla. We split our Doozles in half, used the left side of screen to jot down or draw things that we already know about farms, and we used the right side of the screen to record things we wanted to find out about farms or the Southern Belle Farm in particular. Here are some examples of works-in-progress:
We practiced with the website www.southernbellefarm.com since they have a field trip to the Southern Belle Farm in McDonough next week. From the farm website, we talked about reading headings and recognizing the navigation bar and links. We found the link called "school field trips," and read through what they could expect as part of their fall field trip. I know they are looking forward to it, and I sure wish I could go with them!
To get the children thinking about farms, our activity this week involved making a modified K-W-L using Doozla. We split our Doozles in half, used the left side of screen to jot down or draw things that we already know about farms, and we used the right side of the screen to record things we wanted to find out about farms or the Southern Belle Farm in particular. Here are some examples of works-in-progress:
With third grade this week, I began a character project using Voki. The word "voki" is a combination of the Latin word "vox" (which means voice) and the Norse word "loki" (which means prankster). Our Vokis will be online characters to which we will eventually add our voices. Here is the Voki that I created to introduce the project to my students:
The work we did this week involved using Stickies to get a script written. The children have each chosen one of the following approaches for their Voki project: 1) to brainstorm 3 attributes for their character and give evidence from their book in support of those attributes 2) to explain how their character changed from the beginning of the book to the end 3) to give examples of what their character does and doesn't like, what his/her problem was in the book and how it was resolved. My hope is that this project supports all the hard work the children are doing in reader's workshop around the study of character.