Word Puzzle
Taking inspiration from a fellow blogger - Bec McCartney, I added this word puzzle to our class blog and then gave the students a week to add their answers.
See if you can figure out what these words have in common. When you have done it, post your reply in the comments. Good luck. I will post the answer next week.
1 Banana
2 Dresser
3 Grammar
4 Potato
5 Revive
6 Uneven
7 Assess
In the comments section, write about your week using only one sentence.
My week in a sentence might be:
I had an exciting time watching clever children develop some great ideas for their projects.
Parents and friends are invited to write a sentence as well.
This is a long term challenge I have invited students to accept. As part of their ongoing homework, the students have their own personal writing journals, which they are encouraged to keep at home. These journals can contain postcards, photos from holidays, tickets to events they have attended, feathers, snippets from newspapers etc. and some sort of written reflection for each page. This is a new challenge I have issued them.
* I would like you all to take one photo, each week, for the rest of the year, and paste it into your writing journals.
* Surprise, surprise - now I want you to write something about the photo.
* It may be captions, speech bubbles, poetry, descriptions, your thoughts, a letter, a list, an advertisement, I wonder… etc.
* You may wish to take a photo of the same thing each week (if there is the possibility of being able to notice change eg. a baby or a tree etc) or something interesting that you see quite randomly.
* Whatever you photograph, it must be inspirational to you - so that you can write something about it.
* Add the photo and your written response, to your blog.
* I will take part in this process as well. Why don’t you encourage mum and dad to do it as well. They could paste their photos in your writing journal, or better still, create a journal of their own.
* I’m excited by this. I hope you are too.
* Good luck.
Thanks to Britt (fellow blogger at - www.brittgow.globalteacher.org.au) I have discovered Sudiyo, a very clever tool for creating online quizzes. I plan to introduce Studiyo to the students in year 6 and let them run with the technology. I can see enormous potential for this clever blogging tool. Students will have to know their topics thoroughly to be able to frame appropriate questions and to list plausible, possible answers. They will be able to showcase what they have learnt in a fun and educational way.
I have instructed my students, that whenever they publish work on the net or anywhere else for that matter, they MUST include a virtual bibliography. This bibliography acknowledges their sources from the internet or books, so that the authors are credited with their work. I have instructed them that they must NEVER copy and paste the work of other people, without acknowledging their authorship.
My instructions were to create a table in word, which includes 3 columns, one each for:
URL (website address),
CONTENT - a brief explanation of what was on the site eg photos, info
RATING out of 10 for usefulness
So many of our young writers struggle when it comes to thinking of something to write about. They also try to write about things they haven’t experienced like wars, robberies, gang shoot outs etc. What tends to happen when they write about these sort of things, is that they get to a certain point and cannot continue with the story. Why? because they have no experience to draw on. This slideshare has a few hints for young writers, in how to select a topic of which they have some experience, and are then able to embellish or glamorise the situation.
In my classroom of year 6 and 7 students, I have banned students (mainly boys) from writing about guns, car races, robberies, anything to do with blood and hunting. It was becoming a sheer frustration ploughing through all these sorts of stories which were very much dialogue driven and interspersed with guns going off and people dying. Yawn!
This slideshow contains a number of tips for planning to write a narrative. One of the toughtest things for students to do is to write a narrative. Try it yourself. Next time you set the task of “write a story about….” for your students, sit down and write one yourself. It’s something many of us do regularly, and for many of our students, it can be intimidating and difficult. Hopefully these tips will help the writing process for your students.
My Cyberspace journey continues…..
Just sat down on Friday night, computer, glass of wine
Thought that I had better tweak these wizz bang, blogs of mine,
Incurred a snag so jumped on skype, to try and sort it out
I skyped a geeky friend of mine, who has some IT clout.
Before I knew it, conversation jumped from two to three
Then quietly it evolved to four – a skyping victory.
Problem solved , a master stroke of peer collaboration
4 excited bloggers sharing our exhilaration.
Worked out blogrolls, widgets and some troubling nuisance links
Ironed out several irksome and some quite perplexing kinks.
Worked out passwords; clustrmaps; embedding; using code
Looked at vokis, voicethread, tried to get in twitter mode.
Signed off feeling clever, felt inclined to brag and gloat
Until I checked my email and my a lump formed in my throat
Web 3.0 – you’re kidding! My thoughts are spinning round!
I think I’ll go to bed now; my head’s inclined to pound.
Marg Murnane May 17th 2008
This is an editing checklist I give my students when we write narratives. It is made up of a number of prompts to help them accurately edit their stories.
How can you tell if you are a literacy teacher? You get really excited when you hear that recent research has come up with a revised high frequency word list which includes words which are relevant to students today.
About the Research:
• 2007 research conducted in Australian schools.
• The 307 most frequently used words collected from over 4000 writing samples of students in their first three years of school.
• Wordlist available to ALL Australian educators.
• Supported with FREE fully customisable classroom support material.
• Gathered under the guidance of, and endorsed by, the University of Melbourne.
• Ready for use in your classroom in 2008!
The Oxford Wordlist can be found at:
www.oup.com.au/thesuccessfulteacher
