Friday, March 20, 2009

The Big Chickens Meet Wordle

Wordle: Big Chickens

Teachers are always searching for cool new ways to reach their students. While working on the Big Chickens Project the TDR’s decided (after suggestions from our favorite ESE teacher) to utilize Wordle. Wordle is a great little tool you can use to help create “word clouds”. Words that appear more frequently in your text are greatly pronounced based on how often the word is used. You can create different fonts, color schemes and layouts. This is a great tool for any grade level or project. After reading Big Chickens by Leslie Helakjoski we had our students pick three words each that they thought best described the book. We entered the words into the Wordle website and our “word cloud” was created! I don’t know about you but I see a lot more fun with site words in our future!

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Big Chicken Magazine

Our class LOVED the book Big Chickens! After reading and discussing the author's message of the book, I asked the students to think about a time in their lives that they were afraid and to also reflect on how that all changed. Every boy and girl could relate, and students were sent off to write about this time of overcoming a fear: "I used to be a big chicken, until..." Key components of the response that I expected were: identifying the fear, why was it a fear/what went through their mind, how did they overcome it, and how are they different now that it has been conquered. As part two of the assignment, students then drew a 'before' and 'after' picture to visually show the growth they had made in conquering the fear.



ABOUT THIS WEB 2.0 TOOL:
While searching for a 'fresh' way to present student work (I feel Voicethreaded out! lol), I found this great site called Issuu. Issue takes your Word, PDF, and Powerpoint documents and turns them into online publications. There is a lot of patience and creativityrequired as you must upload the material EXACTLY as you want it. You must also be prepared to need to reload the document completely if changes or additions are needed; and to trouble shoot if some elements upload 'funky!' Overall, though, this a great, easy way to make a class book or magazine out of student writing, journaling, photos, reflections... or even for portfolio constructing!

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Finding the Theme in 2nd Grade




After a reading lesson on theme, or the main message the author is trying to tell, we read the March book of month Big Chickens. Next, my 2nd grade students were told to think about the lessons the characters learned and what they felt the theme of the book was. Students learned that good readers can argue what made them decide on the theme by providing specific details in the story that led them to believe this. Posted above are several students who did a great job of writing the theme and explaining what details from the story supported their thinking.

This assignment is a simple way children can respond to a book. However, it is an extremely meaningful way to encourage children to think deeper about a story. Please encourage your child to always think about the theme as they read and explain what led them to this conclusion
.