Snow, snow, snow

My Backyard...Whoever said Spring was coming soon...lied. :-)

And no I'm not just repeating my last name over and over. Oklahoma experienced a blizzard on Tuesday, Feb.1, 2011. We got a record 17 inches and 6 more today.  They are predicting more on Sunday and Tuesday.  Ugh! We've been out of school since the storm hit. So I've been using technology to talk and discuss with my students.

At the beginning of the year I setup online blogs for my students through weebly.  This allowed for them to have a place to write at home and not worry about their notebooks. Then they print their writing and put it in their notebooks at school.  If you would like more info on this click here.

I've been emailing parents and having them respond on their blogs and on the classroom blog. Here are a few ideas that we've been working on this week as we sit and wait for the snow to stop.

• OCCT test prep
• summarzing in 10 words or less
• monitoring our thinking
• turning in reading minutes online (Might make this permanent for next year)
• framing our essays
• how to write to a prompt (our test is 20 days away)
• slice of life

 If road conditions and the weather doesn't improve soon, I'm thinking of videotaping some lessons and the posting them on the blog.  But I've never done that. However, I can always just google it and figure it out.

Prompt Writing

My students have completed their genre study of essays and today I introduced how we write to a prompt. Thursday I watched my wonderful principal teach a lesson derived from Chapter 9 of Writing a Life by Katherine Bomer. I had tried this lesson about two weeks ago and it didn't really fly or maybe I rushed it. I tried it again with my morning group and got the same reaction she did the previous day. So now my students understand and know what do to if on the day of the writing test they are stuck. They have LOTS of pieces from their notebooks to choose from. I believe the key to trying Bomer's method is too hook them a highly engaging piece that the teacher wrote. I used a humerous one as my hook. Then I took a piece I had written with them and showed them how that would also work. Then they came up with prompts to try and 'stump' me. Everytime I could make it work. I highly recommend reading this book and trying this method if your state assesses writing.