It’s hard to believe that our year has come to a close. Before I made this slideshow, I looked through my pictures of the students and the change in them is absolutely amazing. My earliest pictures on file were taken when they visited our classroom to meet their teacher and classmates. That was over a year ago and they looked very young indeed. Now they are grown. They have met hundreds of new people, can find their way around the school with relative ease, and can solve problems more independently. These are my favorite lessons taught and learned. The other things come more easily once the children feel trust and safety in their own space.We bid a fond farewell to this special group of children. Together we have done amazing things. When they return to school in the fall, they will have new friends and new learning experiences but their time in kindergarten will be held dear for many years to come. Goodbye to the kindergarten class of 2009. Stop by for a visit!

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I asked the children to brainstorm with me about some of the things we have learned this year. This VoiceThread is a sample of just a few of those things. Feel free to add your own comments with the links at the bottom of each picture. You can do this either by webcam, audio only, text, or telephone.

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Each day starts with the children taking out their writing folders, perusing their in-progress work and deciding just what they need to do next. I ask each child in turn to report what they need to do for the session - write, illustrate, edit, read to an adult, or read to the class. I put their name on the white board chart under the required task.

The following video shows the final part of a project and it highlights the work of two typical students. Writers Workshop will continue in much the same fashion through grades one and two. Every child is unique in the lessons they need to work on each day. For some, it’s composing an interesting story. For others, it’s breaking the words into parts and then individual sounds and finally letters. Everyone is a better writer because of this daily practice.
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The slideshow/video below will show you the students with our ducklings. At the very end of the show is a short clip of one hatching experience. It is awesome! If you click on the arrowed box below John’s picture you will have a larger screen for viewing.

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Mr. Russell works with students.

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I attended Scratch Day at MIT on Saturday. There were 200 people there, young and older alike, while thousands of other people around the world participated  in the learning and all using a program called Scratch to create new presentations. The whole program and process was new to me. It was first developed 5 years ago with the first Scratch Day occurring in 2007. Most of you are new to Scratch so let me just say it has some interesting applications in the classrooms and at home with young people. Basic skills needed to work with Scratch are some reading skills and an understanding of numerical value, to know that 12 is less than 21. I have been mulling over my own experience and trying to think of how I can use this program to enhance the learning experience for my students. I spent about 30-45 minutes working on this small action by my “sprite.” It was a fellow student (who happened to be about 10 years old) who helped me to get rid of some of the clutter in my coding and simplify the product. Click on the sprite and you will go to the Scratch page. Click on the sprite again and it will follow the little program I wrote for it.

This is what the program page looks like.

This is a link to the Scratch project page on nursery rhymes. You can’t tell by watching which are created by adults and which by children. My personal favorite is the Baa Baa Black Sheep one.

The brilliant minds at MIT are using a basic block construction in developing their program. Now take this simple building block approach to a higher level and you can see some applications for all kinds of robotics but it goes much further. I am really inspired by Mitchel Resnick, one of the developers of Scratch. Here is a Wonderful! video where Mitch is interviewed and explains the rationale far better than I can. Please take a look. You are sure to be inspired as well.

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Here is an interesting program that I have used in the past. It’s called Wordle and it takes all the words on the main page of this blog and creates them into the illustration below. The more frequently a word is used on the page, the bigger the word is displayed.

For the past couple of weeks, we have been studying and exploring Simple Machines. The key concepts I want the children to know and understand are:

• machines are all around us
• machines make work easier
• levers, inclined planes, and wedges are examples of simple machines

We have used Discovery Education and its United Streaming videos as part of our learning adventure. Here are  some clips of the children creating these simple machines. They declared it to be a really Fun Friday!

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