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!

Our first ELA test of the school year? Check! We had our fiction test this week, which covered everything from fiction reading strategies and characteristics of fiction texts, to analyzing figurative language and writing a text-based essay about a character. Though only seven questions, this test wasn’t easy in that there were a lot of two-part questions. It ended up taking most of the kids a solid two class periods. Whenever we take a test, I always set aside a class period post-test that gives students time for revisions and reflection based on my feedback. It’s important that students view learning as a process, and that assessments don’t just receive a final grade without an opportunity to take my feedback into consideration and apply it to their work. Prior to revisions, I don't include any scores on their answers. Instead, I provide comments and questions in hopes of guiding them to make revisions that result in stronger, clearer responses. We discuss the questions as a class, talk about trends I noticed, and clear up any misunderstandings the kids may have. It isn't until after revisions that I attach a number to each question and grade the test. Students will bring those home this week to show parents, and we'll continue working one-on-one, in small groups, and as a class on various "trouble areas" that were revealed through this test and our whole group reflective discussion on the unit.

On Thursday, we concluded our unit for health, which had a teacher named Mrs. Schneider come in and teach fourteen 40-minute lessons on various topics. Between this unit and the twice-weekly yoga classes we had at the start of the school year, we unfortunately haven't done much social studies. But our schedule is finally back to normal, which will allow us much more time for writing and social studies when the students are with me in the afternoons. Our first unit is on map skills, and on Friday Ms. Tosches came in and integrated this focus with STEAM. Students applied their knowledge of the cardinal directions to create a scratch simulation that had them directing a cat around Somerville. It was cool to see them code, as they know more about coding than I do!

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Kailynn and Colin. Kailynn worked really hard on her ELA test. I didn't hear a single complaint from her, despite its not-so-fun length. Lately she's shown a resilience and ability to bounce back from frustration that makes me proud. Colin is hilarious. He makes me smile everyday with his witty remarks and insightful comments. I can't wait to have lunch with him and a friend tomorrow :) 

Most teachers dread coming into school the morning after Halloween. Most years, I fit into that majority, cringing at the thought of the kids’ excessive candy consumption throughout the day, and the inevitable sugar highs and lows that come with it. It doesn’t exactly make for a normal day at school. But this past Thursday morning, I couldn’t wait for the kids to show up. Though many of them were bound to come in bursting with excitement, stories from the night before, and backpacks full of candy, I was so pumped for them to see the surprise bulletin board I had been planning for the last few weeks. Back in September, I got an email from Viola and Will’s mom with a photo of them both engrossed in books on their couch. It was awesome seeing my students in action at home. I love reading, and I love seeing kids love reading, so it led me to an idea. I sent out an email to all our 4th grade parents, asking that they try to discreetly snap a photo of their child reading outside of school, and then send the photo to me. Over the course of 2-3 weeks, I gathered these pictures of my students reading at home, and then got them printed at CVS. After school on Wednesday, I put together a bulletin board with all the photos, and at the top of the board I included a title that says “Look Who Got Caught Reading…” I want the kids to know how important reading is and how much I appreciate an enthusiasm for reading, and I’m hoping this motivates those kids who don’t read enough at home to start doing so. So, getting to see the looks on the kids’ faces upon noticing the board, and the photos of them (and their classmates) engaged in books at home, made for a pretty exciting morning-after-Halloween. 

This week, Mrs. O’Keefe’s homeroom got a chance to do the character trait stop motion animation. Then on Friday, we did stations that focused on various skills and strategies we spent time on during our fiction unit. Two of those stations involved STEAM, made possible (yet again) by Ms. Tosches. She designed one station that integrated character traits with Makey Makey, an electronic tool involving circuits and a connected Chromebook, and another station that used Beebots. The Beebots station required students to show their knowledge of story elements (as well as differentiate between traits and feelings) through coding. These activities, along with the other two stations, served as a review for the fiction unit test we’ll be having next week. Though it’s a test, it’s important to note that our fiction unit isn’t coming to an end just yet. Following the test, we have 1-2 weeks of reteaching that will be based on how they did on the assessment and what areas the kids would most benefit revisiting. While there’ll surely be some common trends, areas of need will vary from student to student, and the test will allow me to determine which students could use further instruction in each standard associated with this particular reading unit.

Our Bucket Filler this week was Mihali. I’ve known Mihali’s family for a few years now, and I was really looking forward to having Mihali in class. It was easy to anticipate that he’d be a pleasure to teach, but honestly, he’s surpassed my expectations. He’s kind to others, hardworking, respectful, and silly, and he’s made me grateful in his own appreciation for the high expectations I set for my students. Go Mihali!