I began my lesson with Grammar Jammer: Sentences. It's on the Pearson website that my teacher logs onto to teach the lesson for the day. We've done this before when we learned about declarative and interrogative sentences. The students absolutely love it and even sing along! This is a picture of some of the students watching it.
This next picture is of me helping the students while they work on their independent practice. They were creating their sentences that we used for the Voicethread!
The lesson went really well! Once my CT and I had come up with the best thing for me to do, the actual lesson and Voicethread was pretty easy. The children were really engaged with my lesson about exclamatory sentences. They were getting into it with the different sounds that we had come up with for the different punctuation marks. They especially loved that as a class, I modeled the lesson by using sentences that had their names in them. Once they came up with their sentences, we stopped there and I picked them up. That Thursday, I borrowed the microphones and had the students record their voices into the Voicethread. They were so excited! After I did that, my Voicethread was complete. We watched it as a class and they absolutely loved it. Whenever a voice would come on, they would laugh out loud and point to the students talking. It was adorable. They loved it so much, that we watched it one more time. I feel like this lesson and Voicethread was very successful and I'm not sure I'd even do anything differently!
Some HOTS questions for my peers:
What changes to my Voicethread would you recommend? (Evaluation)
In my Voicethread, I had one task that I wanted the children to do. How did yours differ? (Evaluation)
After a lot of discussion and going back and forth with my CT of what I should do for the VT, I finally came to a conclusion. We've been teaching about different types of sentences the past few weeks. Out of all the lessons that I did, my lesson on declarative sentences was my favorite. Because of that, I was inspired to do my VT on sentences. I will be doing it on exclamatory sentences. I'll do the actual lesson on November 8th and probably continue onto November 10th. It will include having the students pair up and come up with two exclamatory sentences. Then, the next time that I go, using the microphone, I will record them saying there sentences out loud. It should be a lot of fun!
For my lesson, I'm really having trouble trying to incorporate the Voice Thread applications with my classroom. I would really like to use the computer modem that is connected to a projector, it would be a great way for the whole class to be involved in the lesson, however, I'm not sure if I can use headphones and a microphone with it. If possible my CT and I discussed that it would be great get the class involved. I am currently working with a 1st grade class so I would definitely like to integrate the kids using the microphone for it. I haven't decided what lesson I'll be teaching yet because I plan on doing it with a later lesson, but I'm pretty sure it will be either math or reading. It will probably be about an hour long lesson seeing as the technology aspect might make the lesson a bit longer. I still need to discuss further with my CT and see what we can do to learn more about how we can utilize the technology in the classroom for this lesson.
Working with Voice Thread today, we were able to really connect Voice Thread with teaching the students. My group and I really loved the VT All About the Human Body.
I found this VT such a good idea and easy to implement in the classroom. It really gives students the opportunity to have fun while learning. They each read something aloud into VT about each of the different body parts (the skeleton, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain). Not only are they learning science, but they are also working on their fluency when reading. For this assignment we also worked with Bloom's Taxonomy and the Multiple Intelligences and the Affordances and Pedagogical Implications. This really got us thinking about how we could integrate this VT, or something like that, into the classroom.
A helpful resource that we used to help with Bloom's Taxonomy about question prompts.
Personally, other than creating my own slide for this class, I've never used Google Presentation. I've always heard of it from a friend of mine, but never got the experience. In order to just write this blog, I had to do a little research on what this all really contains. I had no idea that Google had so much to offer to teachers and students. Although I found the program so beneficial, for some reason I couldn't come up with a way to implement it in the classroom. I did a little bit more research and found a great website that helped further my insight on it; http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/edu/lesson_plans.html. I was mainly looking for ideas that I could use in a lower level elementary class since I am in a 1st grade classroom at the moment. The best lesson plan that I found involved vocabulary. Each student is assigned a vocabulary word and number. The number is corresponding to the slide that they will be working on. Each student is responsible for using the internet to find a definition and pictures that represent the vocabulary word and post it to the Google Presentation. Depending on the grade level and number of vocabulary words, the students can work in pairs or individually. This was a great idea that could definitely get implemented in my curriculum!
