Join us if you can for this year’s Art Show! It’s sure to be FABULOUS!
Daily Archives: March 10, 2013
Changing the Norm
We began our year together talking about norms, and about how we would treat each other as learners. We ended up creating classroom norms and personal standards to live by:
We come back to these norms all the time, calling each other out (including me when I don’t turn off my cell phone, which is a norm they wanted to put on that list) and reminding us of what we’re supposed to be doing.
Well, we’ve added some new norms to our classroom recently, based on new things we’re doing together. And just like the last ones, we brainstormed together and then narrowed down our favorites. And we’re so good at that. I wish I’d have recorded the conversations around these norms, because they are such great examples of respectful, civil discourse leading to consensus. LOVE IT!
Ok, here’s what we’ve got:
Before we started our Literature Circles, we brainstormed how we thought we should work together with our groups. All ideas were fair game, and they had some great ones!
Then we narrowed it down to a more reasonable number of norms to follow. And we do a super job of doing so!
The second group of norms is related to our work on Edmodo (more on exactly what that is sometime soon). We started out without an specific “rules,” just the basic ones that we follow every day in our room. But as we got better used to collaborating and working on Edmodo, we started so have some concerns about how it was going. For me, the best part of this list is that all I had to say was, “I’ve noticed some things about Edmdo lately. What are you thinking about it?” and they thought of the same things as me!
Edmodo concerns brainstorming list
There was an in-between list where they then proposed norms related to each of these concerns, but I don’t have a picture of it. 😦 Fortunately, I think they all ended up on our final poster:
There are a lot of them, but they were all important and necessary to our learning. My favorite one is “quiet hours.” I would never have thought of that one, but it’s related to the online aspect of Edmodo and not disturbing each other with notifications while we’re trying to sleep. SO SMART!
But just like with any expectations, rules or norms, the bid deal is following them. And we’re doing such an amazing job of that! I really do have the best bunch of 5th graders around!
How do you use norms in your classroom? Do you norms look like ours? If so, how so? Thanks in advance for helping us learn!
Another (Writing) Celebration!
I’ve written before about how we use the Writing Cycle in our classroom, and how important celebrating our work is once we’re all finished.
Recently we had another one–this time with Expository Nonfiction Writing that we had done!
Our nonfiction pieces were all based on the structure of introduction, 3 paragraphs on specific topics, and conclusion. They were written in many different forms, but all followed that same structure. Rebekah’s final piece was handwritten on paper.
Many students wrote their essays as feature articles using Pages templates. All they had to do was replace what was there with their info and voila! I was impressed with the variety of topics: Sophia wrote about Artemis, Anna C. wrote a piece about tennis player Althea Gibson, ZB202 wrote about poodles and Natalie wrote about the evolution of the telephone.
Some essays were made with a flier template, and Keelan wrote his as a brochure.
Here’s a great picture of the different end products: Anna K. used Pages to write about Greek Mythology, Devan made a poster that was SHAPED like his topic of tops, and Sammy made a poster about mythology, too.
Some posters were small, like Jernandra’s about lions, Don’s about bulldogs,
and Aiden’s about diamonds…
…and some were big, like Seamus’ about Paul Revere,
Owen’s about Gravity Master Isaac Newton,
and Fiona’s about Queen Elizabeth II.
And thee were even some Keynotes created about nonfiction topics, like Ames’ slide show about fossils,
and Peter’s about Ray Lewis. What a great example of how we can all accomplish the same thing in whatever way makes sense to us!
What do you do to celebrate your writing? How do you “send your writing out into the world?” Tell us what you think!
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 