What's new around Room 16

It's been a while since I posted any pictures of my classroom and the hallway outside, so I thought I'd do a quick update. I recently asked our school director about the possibility of some extra bulletin (notice) boards for the hallway outside my classroom and one more for inside. He said yes, and they were installed a couple of weeks ago. It took quite a bit of time to move material around, freeing up one board for the Khmer classes that meet across the hallway from my classroom to use if they desire. If they don't use it, I will no doubt find a way to fill it up again. Meanwhile, here's a glimpse of the bulletin boards for Grade 4K.

This board is at the front of the classroom,

right beside the whiteboard that is the main focus of teaching,

and where I also project onto, making PowerPoint presentations interactive.

Our IPC units require various resources and student thinking to be displayed.
That's what this board is for.

This is a the other end of the room, and changes regularly.
As the year progresses, I plan to include more Khmer language on this board,
to help increase the children's vocabulary in both languages.

This board is next to the door and holds classroom management material
as well as our IPC Personal Goal material

This photo is the hallway outside my classroom.
As you can see I've now got three bulletin boards
on which to display important information about what we're learning as well as student work.
Board 3 is waiting for student book reports which are almost finished.
I hope to have those displayed before parent-teacher conferences this week.

This is first of the two boards together.
The focus of this board will be what we are learning about.

These cute posters were created during the first week of school
using some foam dolls I picked up at KMart when I was home.
The students loved making these.

First major writing task of the year are our "All About Me" posters.
This was also opportunity to teach students about writing Personal Narratives.
The smiley faces cover photos of the students!

This year we have an improved system in place to follow-up students who are absent. It requires teachers to complete a slip and put it on the door outside our classroom to be collected by one of the guards/drivers during the first part of the morning. I got tired of sticky-taping the note to the door, and then finding sticky tape left on the door, so I asked our maintenance man to screw this cute little character to my door. I was given four of these some years ago, but I hadn't really used them very much. Now I'm really happy to report that, although the first one was broken when they tried to use an electric drill to screw it up, I had another one AND an ordinary screwdriver. Now this cutie is happily doing the job. No more sticky tape!

Highlight from a Reading Log

One of the homework tasks I require of my 4th grade students is 15 minutes of independent or shared reading, followed by a comment in their Reading Log. They have a choice of the 11 response starters below and each week they must choose 4 different starters.

A.  The main idea of what I read was ... B.  My favourite part was ___________________. I like this part because ... C.  My favourite sentence was _______________. I like this sentence because ... D.  This reminds me of ... E.  I did not like the part when ______________. I did not like this part because ... F.  A question I have is ____________________? I think the answer to my question is ... G.  I wonder why _________________(character’s name) said or did ... H.  I love the way the author ________________. I like this because ... I.   What I think will happen next is ... J.  I agree (or disagree) with _________________ _______________, because ... K.  I didn’t understand the part when ...

Yesterday I was busy reviewing the Reading Logs when I came across this gem:

"I love the way the author make new words for me. I like this because if I know alot of new words and how to spell them I would get my spelling test right every Thursday or I could be smarter than Miss Karen."

You can't help loving this student's thinking! This student is stretching himself with fairly advanced Chapter Books, and comments like this help me know he's thinking about what he's reading. Awesome. I love it when my kids use the strategies I teach them to take their own learning to the next level.

So what did we learn last week?

I promised back on Monday last week, that I'd share what the students learned about Chimpanzees during the course of our week-long mini unit. So here is the evidence that my students did learn something, as well as having a lot of fun during the week.

The finished poster

And here are some close-ups of some of the students' comments about their learning.

Definitely some great learning here.



More great learning

This student learned so much he/she needed a second shape!

Some great learning here.

Two students' thoughts

Another two students' thoughts

 If you want to know more about this great unit, check it out at the Disney Nature Chimpanzee website. You can download the great educators' guide for free. My students thoroughly enjoyed it, and I can definitely recommend it as a high quality professional resource.