It's still crazy to think that we have one-to-one Chromebooks in fourth grade. It's not super natural for me to consider the incorporation of technology when I'm lesson planning, but I know that the more I give kids the opportunity to use the Chromebooks, the more confident they'll be when it comes to using the technological tools and resources we have available to us. The biggest hurdle for most kids is their typing skills. Some kids don't use computers at home, so they haven't had much exposure to typing. In addition, I remember literally having typing classes when I was in school, with lessons on how to place our hands on the keyboard and lots of practice to build up our typing pace and stamina. That's not the case anymore, and to be honest, I think it's a bummer. It already feels like there's not enough time in the day, so it's a challenge fitting typing practice into our schedule. But we'll do what we can! I have a bunch of typing games on the "For Students" page of my class website, and I've started giving kids a little time to play them in school in hopes that they'll play some of them at home. During intervention block, I've started creating assignments through online programs like Readworks.org and Commonlit.org. I can select and revise assignments based on the particular skills and strategies kids need to practice, and having the majority of the class working on Chromebooks allows me to focus on teaching differentiated small group lessons. We've also used an app called Kahoot!, which the kids really like. I created a multiple-choice pretest for our fiction unit, and the kids used their Chromebooks to select their answers. This past week, we took the quiz again to track the students' understanding of the standards and vocabulary addressed during the unit. It's an engaging way to gather data in relation to student growth and understanding of a topic, and I'm going to try to use it on a regular basis.

We used the Chromebooks on Friday to continue our focus on writing about characters. Students are typing up a paragraph about a character of their choosing, and then creating a word cloud displaying traits and other information about their character. The word clouds are a lot of fun for the kids to create, and a good incentive for them to work hard on the paragraph itself, since they can't do the word cloud until I've approved their writing! Another activity we did this week addressed one of the concerns the kids had during our post-test reflection, which is their lack of character trait vocabulary. It's hard to come up with traits for characters when you don't know a lot of traits in the first place. So we worked in small groups to explore about 20 new words and their meanings using characters in short fables. Both classes did a great job during this activity.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Kaleah and Basilia. Kaleah had her best week yet. She's been working hard on developing a growth mindset, and I love when I see her proud of herself for not giving up and persevering through difficult work. She excitedly came up to me a few times this week after math class, and I love seeing her eager to share her achievements with me. Basilia has made it known since the beginning of the year that she really values the feedback I give her on her work. She wrote me such a nice note this week regarding the feedback I gave her in her writing notebook. Going through all the kids' Quick Writes takes a lot of time, but it's so worth it when students appreciate and learn from my feedback. Nice job, ladies!