A Simple Way to Make 3-D Graphic Presentations

I am always looking for new ways to add a spark to my teaching and  I found a really great resource to enable student creativity and excitement. Scholastic has published a wonderful and extremely useful book called  3-D Graphic Organizers: 20 Innovative, Easy-to-Make Learning Tools That Reinforce Key Concepts and Motivate All Students! by Daniel Barnekow. The book is filled with 20 organizers and many ideas for using each one. The organizers come with printable templates and directions. The templates are cut and folded into all sorts of interesting graphic displays. There are many ways to use each template and the uses are open-ended as it is easy to think of different ways to use them. I have used templates with math, social studies, and science lessons. The templates certainly capture my student's imaginations and they show more enthusiasm for learning as they get to create something along with learning information. There is a simple rubric for grading the student's creations and there is also an included cd which has pdf files of all of the templates. This is really handy if someone needs a new printout. I don't have to wait to go to the copy room to pring a copy. I can print it out on the computer. Some of the templates on the cd allow you to type in information. This can be helpful for some students or for the teacher who would like to modify the templates. So far we have made a slide chart of math terms related to angles and triangles, a flip table of astronomy terms, and a tri-fold table related to the sun. It is a great way to get students to learn and study facts and to present information that they have learned in a very visual way. I can't wait to try such projects as the twist-tubes, pop-up books, and the spinning wheel. I love to give work that goes beyond basic worksheets and this book is just a great resource for teachers to make lessons creative and fun.

You can view sample pages here.

A Video Game Player's Guide to Success in School

If your student is a video game addict, then I believe they already have developed the skills they need to be successful in school. They just have to apply what they do to be successful video game players in the same way to what they do in school. These are a couple of posters I made a few years ago. They are always worth a good conversation.

Nashua PAL Elementary School Cross-Country Championships

Here is an Animoto video of the Nashua PAL Elementary School Cross-Country Championships held on October 17. There are runners from Main Dunstable School (my daughter's school), Mount Pleasant School(former students), and New Searles School. All runners did a great job running on a crisp Fall morning. (Results: boys 3k, girls 3k, boys 3k team, and girls 3k team. There is no finer sport than cross-country running and it was great to see over 700 Nashua Elementary students participating!

The Secret to Success: Don't Eat the Marshmallow, Yet!

"Don't eat the Marshmallow, Yet!" is not alluding to how to be successful on "The Biggest Loser,” but rather instead to the secret to success in life. It seems that the ability to delay gratification, even at a young age, sets one up for more success in life. Check out what happened with these kids when they were told that if they did not eat a marshmallow, they would receive an additional marshmallow. The squirming they do to NOT eat the marshmallow is hilarious and also a sign that they know how to delay gratification for greater rewards later.

It seems like this entertaining video is based on a similar test that followed young marshmallow eaters or avoiders into their adulthood. Those that were able to delay eating the marshmallow enjoyed greater success in their life, as marked by SAT scores, college attendance, and even debt avoidance. Those are some measures of what makes a successful life and were the measures looked at in the studies. There are other measures of what being a successful person truly means, but I think that it is true that the ability to delay gratification is a skill that is admirable and needed in our "instant" and "self-centered" society.

You can see another video that explains this test more. It is another TedTalks video: this time of motivational speaker, Joachim de Posada,sho is also the author of the book Don't Eat The Marshmallow Yet!: The Secret to Sweet Success in Work and Life.
It is again filled with video of children trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow. He explains some of the lessons we can learn about the benefits of delaying gratification. He even goes so far as to infer that our country has a problem with, "Eating more marshmallows then it produces."

A Simple Playful Classroom

As a long time and "aging" athlete, I have been interested in the concept of "play" as part of sports. It started when I was involved in a discussion on a national running message board about "aging and feeling good while running". A bunch of competitive runners were offering up ideas on maintaining fitness and health as well as enjoying our sport to the levels we had when we were younger and doing so without injury or loss of interest. One thing that kept popping up was keeping running "playful.” The idea is that we should continue to act like the kids we were; running, jumping, climbing, crawling, and just doing things in the outdoors rather than running a set distance or time and returning home. In fact, the discussions are what first led me to create a running blog and later this blog.

I have not had enough time to study "play" as much as I would like, but I see the need for playfulness not only in our adult lives but in the lives of our children. I predict that in a few years fitness activities will move away from gyms and machines and we will see more activities being performed in the natural outdoor arena as adults learn to play as they used to when they were children. Some websites already promote this type of natural play and fitness, such as Erwin Le Corr's Movnat (Move Naturally) and Frank Forencich's The Exuberant Animal.





"All the science that we've come up with backs up what we used to do as kids."

As an athlete, I have been challenged to undo the effects of too much running and biking and having to spend years trying to unravel the damage it has done to my body. I am learning that it is not strength training or stretches that is going to rebuild the balance in my body, rather it is a retraining of the brain. I am doing this through Z-Health joint -mobility exercises that target the nervous system in order to produce movement that is more efficient and through Feldenkrais exercises that retrain neuromuscular patterns so that I can move more correctly and naturally. Interestingly enough both movement therapies deal with how the brain relates and controls movements. I am coming to understand how the brain, thinking, and movement are wonderfully connected.

And then we have school!

Students become mini-adults and sit in uncomfortable chairs and work on paper and pencil assignments, many times quietly and by themselves without any movement or fun. Teachers often appreciate the “quieter” and "still" students over those with energy to spare. Then we notice the tendencies of children to act up or lose concentration in many ways as they become bored and restless. I have been challenging myself to find ways to bring play into the classroom as well as movement, without losing the goal of giving my students a superior education. Responsive Classroom activities, greetings, and games bring in some element of play, but it certainly is not enough. The question then is how do we allow and advocate for movement without losing control of a class, particularly when we know that it allows for thinking that is more creative and invigorated minds.

I am still looking. Brain Gym is a program I have heard about that integrates play, movement exercises, and learning. I have not taken the Brain Gym courses, but the movements remind me somewhat of some Z-Health exercises. These movements are supposed to stimulate learning through movement. There are many Brain Gym books such as Hands on: How to Use Brain Gym in the Classroom that I would like to order some day to explore the concept more closely.

I was investigating another Scholastic book earlier this week called Brain Breaks for the Classroom: Quick and Easy Breathing and Movement Activities That Help Students Reenergize, Refocus, and Boost Brain Power-Anytime of the Day! and I may order this one some day, as it seems to be a possible take-off of Brain Gym, but I am not sure. It looks like it may have some good ideas on helping children concentrate and learn better through play and short activity breaks. While I was looking at this book, I noticed another book that I did order and I received it yesterday.

The book, Silly Sports and Goofy Games, contains many games and activities that look like fun and would be useful mainly outdoors. We did play one game as a greeting this morning as we tossed imaginary objects like an egg, a very hot "hot" potato, a slimy snake, and even a Volkswagens at each other. However today was an end of month Fun Friday for the fifth grade at New Searles School so we went outside to a playing field and a group of students hung around with me and played many versions of tag that I found in the book as well as some balance games. My favorite of the balance games we played looks just like one of the games in the Exuberant Animal video above. It was a lot of fun trying out games and there was a lot of laughter and cooperation. I look forward to trying more ideas from this book and finding away to integrate play into the daily work of my 27 fifth graders.

Finally, here is a wonderful and thought provoking TedTalks video presented by a pioneer in research on play, Stuart Brown, called "Why Play is Vital, No Matter your Age." Have fun watching this and then get outside and play!

Wallwisher.com: A Useful Tool for Creating Online Sticky-note Bulletin Boards

I was looking for a good way to communicate with parents in my classroom and came across a website called Wallwisher.com. It allows me to set up an online bulletin board with Sticky "Post-it" style notes. The page of notes can also be embedded on a blog. I am trying it out on my classroom blog. I find it useful to write quick notes about homework or other classroom activities this way as I can do it anytime and don't have to use up paper. I believe I have set the options so that I am the only one that can leave a note (I have seen what fifth graders can do with sticky notes and don't need my computer decorated that way!). I can edit the notes (not easy) and delete them, as well as arrange them on the desktop if I want to waste some time. You can include links with pictures, audio, or video. I hope that my parents find this tool useful. I have put up notes with additional help and hints for completing some extra credit assignments that make the work easier and more understandable for my students. I can also write silly notes to hopefully generate some fun and interest. If a student forgets to write the homework down or if parents want to check homework assignments then they can look for a homework note each day. A link to my classroom's full screen version is here. What I like is that I could embed my wall in my classroom blog and that way parents don't have to navigate to different pages. I can thinks of many additional uses for this website tool. The website is free to use and teachers and parents may want to try it out for their own purposes.

Saying Hello to New Searles Elementary School

I am teaching at a new school in Nashua this year. After 21 years of teaching at Mount Pleasant Elementary School, I have moved across town to teach at New Searles Elementary School. It is exciting learning the culture of a different school, meeting new teachers, and starting all over again in a different setting ( I was in the same classroom for all 21 years at Mount Pleasant). I like what I see at New Searles and I know I will enjoy teaching here. I also get to learn a new curriculum as I have moved up to a fifth grade position. To top it all off, I have gone from a class of 17 students last year to a room with 27 students, fortunately they all seem nice enough so it is going to be a great year full of adventure, learning, and fun!

Not being one to procrastinate when it comes to teaching, I got the class off to their first project on the first day of school. Fortunately we have been having gorgeous weather in Nashua and that of course meant we had to go outside and study some of the trees in front of the school. Before we did that however we had a lesson that focused in on words and how they can be used (and how to play around with them). I prepared a similar lesson at Mount Pleasant School last year and wrote about it here. Briefly I gave each students all of the words from William Carlos Williams poem, "The Locust Tree in Flower":


The Locust Tree in Flower

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

The words were not in order. I asked them to make sense out of these words. They could add words if they wanted and could write in phrases, sentences, a paragraph, or even poetry form. When I showed the class the poem they were a little confused as it didn't make sense. I told them my best interpretation of the poem is that William Carlos Williams put the words in a random type of order with some omissions of important words. Upon reading the poem a few times the class matched up some words together and started making some sense of the poem.

I took the class outside and divided them into four groups to study four different trees in front of New Searles School. I told them to write down words or phrases that described the tree and its surroundings. Later upon entering the school, we used the words to create our own poems like "The Locust Tree in Flower". I told them poets are rule breakers and get to write their own rules. The rules I wanted them to follow was to have a title, and a thirteen word poem (one word per line), and to arrange it like Williams' poem 3 words, space, 3 words, space, 3 words, space, 1 word. For homework I had them tear out the paper and colorize each word on each piece of paper. The next day we went outside and arranged the papers on the grass. Fortunately it was another nice day and the papers did not blow away. I took 27 times 15-20 photos for each poem in under 45 minutes and filled up my memory card on the last photo! I did see some students took the "poets can make up their own rules" in their own way and misspelled some words or put more than one word on a line.

The photos will be used to make animoto videos (Digital Poetry) of each student's work. I made a couple of sample videos here. I have a ways to go since the school computers cannot handle this task. However, I think some students may wish to try this at home so for those who choose to do that I will send them the photos.

Animoto is a fun little program. Teachers can sign up for a free account here. It makes professional looking videos that are matched up with music. Each video is unique and can be shared. A free account will let you make videos at home, but they are limited to 30 seconds each. Animoto just announced that you can insert video clips into the videos now, so I went back to the school on Sunday and took a few brief videos of each tree (well one tree was the wrong tree!) and included a video clip in both of the sample videos that I made. The first is Darcy's poem and the second is the poem that James wrote.