It takes a village...

After almost 8 weeks of consistent effort with my students this year to improve their writing skills, I feel that today I have had a memorable moment!
My 27 Year 4 students are good little students and okay writers, but eight weeks ago, they were happy enough to give me a response that was "near enough" and not quite good enough.
Little things like capital letters, punctuation and editing for basic spelling were not a high priority for them. If they felt they had completed a task with a mediocre effort, they saw no point in refining their response, editing their work, or sometimes even putting a capital letter for their own name.
Turning them around to actually taking some pride in their work has not happened overnight but lots of practice and feedback, feedback and more feedback has had some effect on their writing habits.
Earlier in the year we watched this great short video about feedback:

We discussed the role of feedback in helping us to grow as learners and the students have had many opportunities to give and receive feedback and to reflect on what they learnt from the feedback.

This week we are looking at how we are part of a bigger, global community of learners, and my success with my young writers can be attributed to the work of other passionate and dedicated educators around the globe.
In particular, I can thank three great educators for my success as a classroom teacher this week:

Julia Skinner @100word from the 100 Word Challenge

Sue Wyatt @tasteach from the Student Blogging Challenge and

David Mitchell @DeputyMitchell from Quadblogging

Each of these people is passionate about making a difference to the learning of students not only in their own schools, but all over the world. They share their amazing talents and energies to assist other teachers like me to make a real difference in classrooms all over the globe.

This year is the first time I have been involved with the 100 Word Challenge after having seen it somewhere (probably Twitter) a while back. Each week Mrs Skinner posts a prompt and around 2000 students from around the globe respond to the prompt in 100 words. They post their responses to a class or student blog and then a band of volunteers provide specific and effective feedback to the students about their writing. The look on the faces of students as they discover that their assignment has been read and appreciated by someone from another part of the world, is priceless.

The Student Blogging Challenge was a (very) lucky find after I decided to try using Edublogs as my blogging platform for my class this year. The Student Blogging Challenge has been running since 2008 and through the weekly activities that are interesting and relevant to student bloggers. As a bonus, many activities align quite well with a lot of aspects from the Digital Technologies curriculum and ICT capability continuum from the Australian Curriculum. Participating in the challenge (I'm only four weeks in) has already helped to push me as an educator into trying new things or rediscovering old tricks. I know my students are benefiting from their involvement too. So far, we have focussed on protection of personal information, writing quality comments, and understanding creative commons and copyright issues. All of these are important issues for digital citizens and learning these things alongside hundreds of other students and teachers from around the world makes our learning even more exciting and purposeful.

Quadblogging is something I have been involved with before. I have just been assigned to a quad for this year and after sending out a first welcome email to our quadblogging buddy teachers and adding their blogs to our side panel so the students can easily access their blogs, I am eagerly anticipating getting started on a new adventure with classes from Sweden, US and UK.

What these three opportunities have in common is that they have given my students a real purpose for their learning and particularly for their writing. When you know that someone else (besides the teacher) is going to read your work, then there is suddenly a reason to make sure that what you have to say is both interesting and well punctuated. While they enjoy reading and commenting on their classmate's work, receiving a comment from a stranger who has taken time out of their day to say how much they have enjoyed what they have to share is so much more special.

So today, we shared our thoughts on how we can save water after World Water Day 2015 and as I approved the comments a tear came to my eye as I noticed how far they have come as a class with taking pride in their work and editing for punctuation and basic spelling. While their sentences are still not perfect (and I have some concerns for the hygiene of the child who has pledged to have 40 second showers in a bid to save water) I can see that all the hard work is paying off. (If you have time to drop by the class blog and leave a comment - they really love comments)

Thank you to those inspiring educators who inspire me and challenge me to push my students to new heights! 

The 100 Word Challenge

This week I tried the 100WC with my students for the first time.
If you have never heard of the 100 Word Challenge, then you can find out more about how to enter on their website: 100wc.net
Basically, once a week, some amazingly committed and enthusiastic educator posts a writing prompt and then children from all over the world write 100 words inspired by the prompt and posts it to a class or student blog.
The great thing about the 100WC is that the students can become part of a global community of young writers who are all working together to get better at their craft.
A team of dedicated parents and teachers (known as Team 100WC) volunteer to read and comment on the students' work. Students who enter are also encouraged to read other entries and to comment on other people's work.
At the end of the week a select few entries are chosen to be the "showcase entries" for the week. This gives students something to aim for, but also an easy way to identify some entries that are good examples of writing.
It was only our first round, but I was so excited by the way that my class were so motivated to write, read, reflect, write, read and write as they posted their own work and commented on their classmates and read the comments they received.
We did have some discussion about comments the week before.
I used the T.H.I.N.K. acronym to introduce a discussion about what might be appropriate or inappropriate in an online discussion. Since some of my kids have appeared to have confused blog comments with "chat", we really discussed the "helpful" and "necessary" components. I added to our blog expectations that the comments needed to be on topic, as opposed to random chit-chat.

We also watched one of my good-ole-favrits: Mrs Yollis' Guide to Writing Quality Comments.

This week as part of our focus on the qualities of a good learner, we looked at the role of feedback in helping us to reflect on our work so that we can improve.
I can never get sick of the video about Austin's Butterfly on the effectiveness of good feedback, and any student or teacher I have watched it with has enjoyed it as much as I have. It really helps students to visualise how learning can improve when they receive and reflect on good feedback.

After discussing the role of feedback and watching this video, the students were excited about the prospect of getting feedback on their own writing, and the quality of the feedback they gave to each other was much better than the usual "Good job" or "Nice story" because they had an understanding of what good feedback might look like.
I would like to get the students to read the feedback they received from me, their peers, parents and other readers from around the globe to set themselves a personal goal for their writing that they can work on for the rest of this term.
If you would like to give them some more feedback, I am sure they would love for you to read and comment on their work. Our 100 Word Challenges can be found at: http://mrsbathamsclass.edublogs.org/
We will continue to work on writing comments and feedback throughout the year.
Yesterday I found another good website that also promotes writing using peer feedback: http://www.writeabout.com/
I particularly like their guides to writing comments and self and peer review.
They have a great little poster that I might add to my growing collection of "tech help" on my back wall:

WriteAbout have also produced a short, student and parent friendly guide to writing comments which elaborates on the messages in this poster.

It is early days yet with our writing, but if we can maintain our enthusiasm, the 100 Word Challenge seems to be a very useful resource for improving student writing!

Deskmats and Whiz Words

I have been busily preparing for the first day back at school. There always seems so much to do, and a lot of the jobs are fiddly. At least during the holidays I get the chance to play around a bit with these fiddly jobs and as I don't feel so rushed I find it takes all day to get the job done to my expectations.
Today I created files for my deskmats. These placemats are very handy. Last year I used them everyday as part of my morning routine and the students referred to them often during both literacy and numeracy activities. It is very useful to have the help right in front of them.
I have made a simple freebie version with the Whiz Words on a mini-poster. These could be printed two-to-a-page and glued inside a homework or writing book as a quick reference for some of the commonly used words.

My full placemats are available in three different fonts and in two formats. I use Queensland "qcursive" font which is a precursive font with exits and entries. It is great to have a handwriting model on their desks everyday. I also included a copy with a beginners font for younger students and a plain font for people who don't use the Queensland font. The PDF version is simple to print and all the hard work is done for you. If you would like to customise your deskmats, I have also created a PowerPoint version.

Our Marvellous Toys

To assess the students listening skills this week we listened to an old song about a marvellous toy by Peter, Paul and Mary.

The first time we listened to the song, the students sat on the carpet with their eyes closed and concentrated hard on listening for key details that told them what it looked like and what it did. (Listening for key details is one of the English skills identified for Year 2 students in the Australian Curriculum.)

After that, they returned to their desks and we listened to the song again, this time pausing it after each verse and chorus so they could write down what they had heard in a concept map.

The third time they listened I let them draw what they thought it looked like based on what they had heard in the song.

While they were drawing I walked around and checked their work quickly to identify who had heard particular details. Fortunately I have a student teacher at the moment so she was able to scribe for my student who wasn't able to record his own ideas.

I explained to the children that the toy is imaginary so there is no "right" answer but we discussed the features it needed to have to be the toy from the song.
Finally we watched an animated version on YouTube and also read a book about the same marvellous toy the next day. The children really loved the song.

Here are our pictures of the marvellous toy:

We have started a written task as a follow up as well. Once they have finished I will have them post their descriptions on our class blog.

This was an enjoyable way to quickly assess their listening skills and to discuss different artists' impressions.

Working on Writing

Over the past few weeks I have been busy blogging with my class on our class blog. We have had the pleasure of blogging with a few other classes in our Quadblogging project.
While this experience has been great for my kids and they have gained heaps from it, I think I have also learnt a lot from getting a glimpse into what other teachers are doing with their classes.
One of our buddy classes, Swanroom 9, have done some fantastic writing that has made me have a serious think about how I am teaching writing in my room.
They were given a story starter and then they had to write the setting description for the story. They had to write about what the character could see, hear and feel. What they came up with was fantastic.
Since listening to their story settings, my students have been inspired to write some of their own, and I have been inspired to rethink my teaching.
I have also managed to put in place many of the great ideas in the Daily 5 book (yes, it took me a while, but I LOVE it now that we are doing it).
I am going to use the 7-up Sentence idea (download my freebie sentence starters here) that I have seen all over the web to work on our writing in the next couple of weeks since we are nearing the end of term. Then, next term I am going to try to become a better writing teacher.
So, what is a 7-up sentence? Simply a way to encourage children to write more interesting sentences by making a sentence with seven words or more! Simple enough to work - I hope...
Students start with a three word sentence that is obviously boring. Then they alter it by adding adjectives, phrases, substituting synonyms etc to create a sentence that is worthy of publishing. I am going to introduce the idea to my students and then get them to write their sentences on our blog as replies to a series of comments.

School Writing - An iPad App Review

I was lucky enough to be given a copy of the School Writing app by demografix to trial with my class. After only two weeks of playing around with it, I feel I am only beginning to uncover the possibilities of how this fantastic app can be used with my students.

School Writing is a well-designed and thoughtfully planned app that can be used to assist children in developing handwriting, word recognition and spelling skills.

The app is comprehensive and packed with useful features but is still simple to use.

On first downloading and opening this app I was pleasantly surprised that it allowed me to quickly and easily add enough users for my entire class, as well as a “teacher” user that I created so I could play with the app myself and become more familiar with its many features.

School Writing comes preloaded with plenty of lessons to keep a class busy for a long time, but then it also allows teachers to create their own lessons to suit a particular focus or need.

Even though the name suggests that it is for teaching and practising writing skills only, it has prewriting activities (traceable shapes, mazes and dot to dots) as well as some numeral activities.

For early learners, the app could be used to develop tracing skills, numeral and letter recognition and formation skills.

Some of the preloaded activities include lists of Dolch words, word lists based around sounds and pairs of opposites.

The font setting can be changed to match Australian, New Zealand, US and UK school fonts in both print and pre-cursive styles. For print fonts there is also a choice between solid, dotted or outlines with starting points marked in.

I used this app in my classroom with some of my struggling spellers. I was quickly and easily able to add in my weekly spelling list and had the option of replacing some or all of the letters with dashes to make it more challenging, as well as recording the spoken word, with a sentence if preferred. This gave them an opportunity to practise their writing at the same time as their spelling. As soon as they finished the lesson, the app emailed me a file that I can view on my computer to check to see how they went.

Adding the list to one iPad with multiple users was a very simple process, and with the ability to import and export word lists via the demografix website, DropBox or iTunes, adding the weekly spelling list to multiple iPads is probably relatively painless too.

My brain is ticking over with the possible applications for this app in my own classroom in the future. Having individualised spelling lists in the past has been difficult to administer and time-consuming, but with this app it would be possible to set up customised lists. If the words were entered as blanks and the word and sentence was recorded in the app, then my students could take their spelling tests on their own and they would be emailed to me once they were done. This would mean that the students who worked more quickly would not be frustrated while waiting for the slower ones to finish and the child who invariably doesn’t hear the word due to distractions and is three words behind the rest of the class every week could listen to the word as many times as they needed and not feel pressured by everyone else who needs to move on. Also, any child who was out at the time of the test could take it at another time.

I am wondering if this app would work through a VGA adaptor so that students could write the words on the IWB. I don’t have a VGA adaptor, but if I did then having students trace the words in enormous letters would be another fun way for them to practise their spelling and letter shapes, and would be a good “midline-crossing” exercise.

Lessons to focus on word families and rhyming would be a cinch to create using School Writing.

The ability to record the student’s voice enables teachers to assess sight word recognition, or oral sentence construction using a list of words as well.

Because of the number of ways that this app can be customised, its application in the classroom or for home learning is extremely flexible and I am sure that as I become more familiar with the range of settings, I will find many more ways to use the School Writing app to support my learners.

If you are interested in finding out more about this app, visit the demografix website.