Kindergarten Writing Rubric

My colleague, Mrs. Nazarenus, developed an amazing rubric that my children found to be helpful as they wrote during writing time! Kate identified six focus skills that the kids need to work on in order to produce grade-level work. The skills include: conventions, ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency and voice. Kate included kid-friendly pictures and words so that they feel comfortable using the rubric as they write. The photo included within this blog entry shows a student referring to the rubric as she worked on her piece of writing! THANK YOU KATE FOR CREATING SUCH A FUN RUBRIC!

ArtisanCam Picture Book Maker

ArtisanCam Picture Book Maker is a fun and free tool that you can use to create your very own children's book. My children were studying dialogue in writing and we used our prior knowledge of quotation marks, exclamation marks and letter formation to correctly publish our own book. We titled our book, "Vanilla the Gorilla." It's a story about a gorilla who travels to China in search of Ramen Noodles! Click on the following link to read our story and let us know what you think!

ToonDoo!

After reading "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," my students summarized the events of the story because we had just finished learning how to identify the beginning, middle, and ending parts of stories. While using a graphic organizer, the students drew pictures of the beginning, middle and ending of the story. Then, after sharing their work with a partner, I introduced ToonDoo.com, "a cool, comic-creating tool from Jambav, a fun site for kids. Jambav is devoted to creating a unique array of free and customizable online games of educational value for children of all abilities."

After the students became familiar with the website, we collaboratively made a comic strip that represented the beginning, middle and ending or the story. The kids enjoyed picking out the graphics and creating the text! We hope that you enjoy our summary!!!

Mini-Laptops!

Our classroom received new laptops! Our school made a decision to distribute the computers that were apart of the laptop cart! Now, each classroom in our primary hall has at least 2 or 3 little laptops that are perfect for little fingers! I was nervous when we received the computers because I wasn't sure if the kids could use the touchpad on the computer. However, I was really surprised to find that the kids were able to use the touchpad on the computer! I'm beginning to think that kids are pre-wired to use technology!

Storybird.com

Miss. Czaja and Mr. Giles' classes worked together to make this awesome book for our collaborative Global Learner project. Each of the classes chose 13 letters of the alphabet and found graphics that match each letter. Then, the classes shared their part of the story with the other class to help them edit each other's book. The online book features awesome graphics that were found on the Storybird website. Storybird is a free website for parents, teachers and artists. All you have to do is find a theme that you want to use and create text for each page! It's as simple as that!

If you have any questions, feel free to email us! And if you want to check out our story, click on the following link!

We Got Clickers!!!

The SMART Response LE interactive response system helps you deliver assessments and record student results. Wow! It has been amazing to watch my kids effortlessly learn how to use the clickers. I explicitly told them how to treat the clickers and everyone has been respectful of their clickers. Also, assessing my students has never been easier! I have taken assessments from Storytown and converted them into a Smart Notebook file and have been giving pre and post assessments for each of the themes. We absolutely love our clickers!

White Boards are Engaging!

I am so thrilled with my recent purchase of whiteboards! That's right, I broke down and purchased a class set of whiteboards because the kids were getting bored with me showing them how to make upper-case and lower-case letters for a solid ten minutes! With my new system, the kids eagerly watch me model how to write a particular letter while the sit next to their individual whiteboard and pounce on the opportunity to create their own letters! The kids are having a great time practicing how to write each letter and I am excited because they happily write and erase each letter! I can't think of a better purchase for the newly created writing block!