Teacher+Reflection+Page

8/5/09 Today was the first day of school. The students took the 4 question pre test. They were not happy with me. They wanted clarification on the questions. I told them to write down what they thought. They had to write something and could not leave it blank. Some wrote "I don't know." I told them that was fine.

8/6/09 Today we read Katy and the Big Snow. I asked them why would I have them read a book about snow in August. They made the following connections: We are reading it because of Mrs. Winter (IA - snow = winter) We are reading it because we miss Mr. Snow (former IA that moved to FL) They read the story with a partner then they were divided up into Literature Circles. The following jobs were assigned. Discussion Director, Literary Luminary, summarizer, Connector, Vocabulary Enricher, and Illustrator. The wonderful Mrs. M. led the discussion director group and helped them think of the question "What services did the city provide for the community?" After each group discussed the questions, I reminded the students about the pretest we took the day before. I asked them if they remembered the question, "What services does the government provide for the community?" Faces lit up, eyes got big and round, smiles broke out from ear to ear. Ahhhhhhh, now we know they said. We briefly talked about the inquiry project. I told them they would be building more background before we got to research in the media center.

8/10/09 Today we showed the video about taxes. Things weren't all technologically in place, so we did it as a whole group on a projector, instead of on individual computers. Much of the information went over most of the kids' heads. However, I would say the objectives were met: They were introduced to taxes, and know that taxes is the main way we pay for the government to provide services. Most of the students can also talk about the 2 main kinds of tax, sales and income. I'd really like to try this presentation in other classes to get more of an idea of whether I should re-record some of the video segments. Also, would like to get the technology problems solved to let a group try to do the interactive part on individual computers.

The tuned-in students are a little put off about taxes now, but also realize the importance. They seem ready to rise to the occasion of deciding which services are most valuable, and therefore are "worth" their tax money.

8/20/09 We have been busy working just not so good about posting. The students are in groups now. Fire, police, parks, school, libraries, and trash. Interviewing and notetaking was modeled yesterday in the media center. Today we interviewed the new principal, Ms. Hunt. All the kids wrote one question in each of the questioning frame. The classroom teacher selected 7 questions to be asked at the interview. Our attention span can't take much more than that. A question was asked. The answer was given. Then the students wrote all the key words they could remember. All in all I say it went well. We will see tomorrow when we review what the students wrote down. There were some blank lines on a few papers but that was to be expected. We will fill them in during group debriefing tomorrow. Lauren had the brilliant idea to use the little video camera(name is escaping me) to video tape the interview so if we have discrepencies in our notes we can look at the interview again. The students have also surveyed the school what they think is the most important service. We used tally marks a second grade skill that was just reviewed in math class. They took the data to the computer lab to make circle graphs on max count. I will let Lisa post about that. Also to be noted kids are tuned in to the taxes and continually bring that up during our math lessons. cool!

//8/20/09 O.K., so I was really excited about using Max Count to create our circle graphs (or what I affectionately call a pie chart~ yum!). I spoke with our tech earlier in the week and found out I had installed the OLD version, and that I needed to delete that so he could install the 2007 version. I saw him remote in and get started, so silly me, I assumed we were good to go for Wednesday. Well, about 20 minutes before the class arrived, I realized I didn't have SKeys on my teacher computer, which I planned to use to demonstrate. I made a quick phone call and got that taken care of. The class arrived, I showed them how to start entering data, and then they were raring to go. Too bad Scholastic Keys was only on 3 of the 30 computers!!! After an irate voicemail, we quickly switched to plan B~ using Excel is waaay more complicated, especially for this group, but I was proud of them for doing so well. As they were about 2/3 through entering the data, the tech decided to fix the problem and remote in to half the lab, which totally freaked the kids out! We decided to forge ahead and complete the task in Excel, but since I haven't used it as much, I couldn't find all the cool features I had shown them in Max Count. It bothered me more than it bothered them. They really enjoyed playing with their graphs, changing the color schemes and labels. All in all, I would have loved to have things run differently, but they had fun and were able to create some great pie charts (circle graphs). //