Theme Table Activities
We will still have our 7 stations to explore as well! Robotics, Tinker, Drawing, Computers, Maker Table, Animation Station, & Listening Station.
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Book of the Month: If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen or (If I Built a Car) . In this book, a boy named Jack designs the house of his dreams, complete with a racetrack, flying room, and gigantic slide. His creativity and enthusiasm immediately inspire young inventors to imagine their own fantastical designs. Kids are immediately captivated by the possibilities of a “Dream House,” and it easily leads into a discussion about smart homes of the future that use cleaner forms energy, withstand natural disasters, and offer exciting entertainment features. Have students design and create models of a “Smart Home” with features of the future and rooms of their dreams. Have them research alternative energy sources, strong construction materials, and methods of insulation.
We will still have our 7 stations to explore as well! Robotics, Tinker, Drawing, Computers, Maker Table, Animation Station, & Listening Station. October "FLI Lesson"
Each month, your kiddos are introduced to a new app or STEAM initiative during their CL&I weekly visit. We are still completing Stop Motion Animation lessons (ask them about this!) with grades K-3 and will introduce our digital drawing apps later this month. We are so fortunate to have ipads & Apple pencils in the CL&I as well as in our art rotation with Mrs Atkinson! These were purchased with a grant funded by our wonderful DS Education Foundation! Book: The Dot by Peter Reynolds (Amazon) Theme Table Activities 1. Dot Day Collaborative Art Project 2. Dabo Ink 3. Checkers We will still have our 7 stations to explore as well! Robotics, Tinker, Drawing, Computers, Maker Table, Animation Station, & Listening Station. Things we'd love donated this month: 1. Volunteer time! We need help cutting circles for the campus wide art collaboration piece. 2. Markers! We use markers a lot! A lot. 3. Popsicle sticks. This is mainly for next month but we'll start collecting them now. Each teacher will be receiving a folder with the following documents in it. Most of these are designed to be digital copies (with links embedded) but I went ahead and gave you a paper copy as a reminder to find them when your days feel less like you're treading water. I understand the beginning of the year is crazy and links just get lost. (These will also live in the RSES Shared Folder for future reference in case you lose this email)
*DSISD Login required for most of these documents as well Top 10 things to get your year off to a great start (paper copies were provided as well): RED = ACTION REQUIRED SOON!
It's that time of year again! Schlitterbahn Waves of Pages reading logs were sent home today via our campus Thursday Folder as well as in an email to homeroom teachers.
I will send out an additional reminder about this as the due date approaches (February) but until then...just please encourage your kiddos to be logging their reading hours! These Schlitterbahn tickets are always a big hit when we get to pass them out. Thanks! Teachers, I'd love to help you in any way that I can. Please review my "FLIer" for specific ways I can support you as well as a challenge to get you started on an innovative school year!
In my last post I shared my opinions on the importance of teaching our students how to tell stories. The exciting part of that task is there are TONS of fun (translation = engaging) tools available to help with these lessons!!
And because the great www is open to anyone, there are also TONS of tutorials on how to use these resources and get you started. All you need to know is how to type in the word "tutorial" after whatever program you're trying to learn. T-u-t-o-r-i-a-l ....maybe that should be a required spelling word from now on. There are numerous tools out there for user friendly creation of animation but DoInk (Green Screen & Animation) is a current fav. Want to try it today?
When I was in school we were taught that essays needed to have 5 paragraphs...an introduction, a conclusion and three supporting paragraphs. As the world wide web has opened it's doors to welcome anyone old enough to peck a few keys on a keyboard, I think the needs & parameters around writing has changed. And...as someone who purposefully breaks grammar & sentence structure rules quite often, I love it.
Were you still able to follow my train of thought? I broke a bunch of rules my high school english teacher worked really hard to teach me. Or...am I able to creatively play with sentence structure & break some rules because I know the "proper" way sentences are supposed to be structured? Does creativity evolve only after we understand the foundational patterns (in math, in writing, in art, etc) or can we be creative without any regard to organic or established patterns in our world? Sometimes I think we need to recognize patterns that exist in order to see ways to break them. Sometimes I think those patterns are getting in our way! Either way, I'm thankful that my high school english teacher taught me the most boring way ever to write so I could look for all the ways to break the rules later when I was given "permission." Storytelling is an art and although I'm conscious of the principles shared in these two books every time I propose ideas now, I'm FAR from practicing them. Is storytelling something we are consciously teaching our students? Will they be able to make their ideas "contagious" or "make their ideas stick" with our world? What do you think? Which comes first...establishing the norm then allowing for creativity to expand it OR allowing creativity to establish a new norm? “You have 10 seconds to draw a clock on a piece of paper. Ready, go.”
We quickly scrambled to find paper & any tool that could pass as a writing utensil and sketched out our version of a clock starting with the basic shape & adding as many details as possible until the timer went off. After sharing our drawings the majority of our clocks actually resembled each other. Everyone can visualize a clock and it’s a fairly simple picture to actually draw, even for those who don’t deem themselves the artistic type. Without much discussion, just some observational comments… we were then tasked to draw another clock & this time we had 10 minutes. “Go.” Hmmm. He’s tricking us, what does he really want us to draw? What does he want to get out of us? So many different kinds of clocks…what kind should I draw? I’ll go with this kind of clock and just take my time. Man oh man, 10 minutes is a long time. Add some more details…Look to my neighbor, maybe they have a different kind of clock going than mine. Is the timer done yet? Add more details. Shading. “Ok pencils down.” As we shared our 10 minute clocks it was obvious all the variety of a simple icon a small group could produce. “A clock is a clock.” But is it? Two observations were shared… First, “A clock is still a clock, we could allow more time but the product could be viewed by our students/audience as the same.” If time is limited in the classroom, one area we could re-evaluate is…where are we putting value in our time? In what areas are we giving our students the most time? Are we giving them enough time to be creative? And second, "It was harder to even get started when the time was longer.” Decision paralysis is real. Sometimes more constraints help us make necessary decisions & allow us to see the core. If given 10 seconds we may see a circle with a minute & an hour hand…if we have enough time we may even get to add some numbers in there! But given 10 whole whopping minutes and whoa does that change the assignment. We can not only add all the details we visualize, but more than likely we’ll have time to spare…time to think, time to reflect. Time to think, in most situations, can only benefit the recipient. As leaders I believe it is important to remain aware of when those constraints are not only important but necessary as well as remain aware of times when it’s necessary to give ample time to think & add details to your simple clock. This morning, the official selections for Global Read Aloud 2017 were announced. To learn more about this visit GlobalReadAloud.com Early readers selection: Fenway & Hattie by Victoria Coe Fenway and the story of how he sees the world is one that is bound to make us laugh but also see our world in a different view; what can happen when we simply change our perspective? Upper Elementary/Middle Grade Selection: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
I hope that The Wild Robot by Peter Brown helps up all see the world for how similar we all are, rather than our differences. |
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October 2018
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