Snowflakes for Sandy Hook

In the wake of the recent threats against our schools and the worrying our students have been doing over these past few days, I decided that the best way to combat this was by participating in the Sandy Hook Winter Wonderland Project. My students worked together to create a beautiful collection of snowflakes to send to Sandy Hook Elementary school, and were able to ease some of their worrying in the process. Here are some pictures of our progress! When we get back from break, I intend to use this as an opportunity to discuss digital citizenship and appropriate behavior online.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Attaching Standards to CPS Questions to Track Grammar Progress

During our professional development today, Tony Bollino showed us how to make our own standards in CPS to track our students progress on our own terms. I immediately thought of our weekly grammar practice, since it is hard to really gauge how much of the grammar the students are grasping. Specifically, it's obvious that some aspects of grammar are more difficult than others.


    I created a quiz question with the entire sentence of the week (in this case, "the evil doctor does experiments on his patients he doesn't want anyone to find out"). Each question referred to one word in the sentence, which the students had to identify. By attaching a standard to each question, I can track the students' progress in every part of speech individually. Thanks, Tony! This was great!

Creating the Standards

Quizzing Students

The Results!

By generating a report based on the standard, I can view the students' results based on each specific part of speech. This allows me to see where my students are doing well, and where I need to do some re-teaching later. Overall, this was a really great new aspect of CPS that will make these assignments much more meaningful!

Cps Data

Powerful Women in Literature

I found this link while browsing the internet the other night and I thought it was very interesting. I liked their choices, especially because they chose characters from both classic and modern literature. Check it out below! 

10 of the Most Powerful Women in Literature

Courtroom Lingo

As we get closer to the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, the students will need to brush up on their courtroom lingo in order to follow the events of Atticus's iconic speech. Below is a screenshot of a web-quest that I did with my students to prepare them. For this lesson, I used Edmodo and a couple of sites I found relating to the vocabulary. Students worked together to find the definitions of these terms. This prepared them to read the courtroom scene without time-consuming interruptions to explain what the terms being used meant.

Jury Service

Glossary of Courtroom Terms

The 6 Word Memoir

I have heard of the 6 Word Memoir before, but I have never found a use for it in my classroom. This year, I taught the novel Monster in which a young boy creates a memoir in the form of a script of a murder trial in which he is involved. My students seemed particularly interested in the movie aspect, and I wanted to give them the opportunity to tell their story. 

Clicking the link below will take you to the website I used for this lesson. Rather than a PowerPoint or a worksheet, I created an interactive website with all of the examples, explanations, and instructions for creating their own video memoir.

WebQuest - The 6 Word Memoir

My students really seemed to enjoy watching the videos with samples of 6 word memoirs. I told them that when they created their own, honesty was the most important aspect. Their work was outstanding and their memoirs really came from the heart. Below is an example I did with my Heather Ridge Students.

Using Class Dojo for Presentations

After a couple of weeks of practice, it was time for our class Poetry Out Loud competition. Students were chosen at random using Class Dojo.  This is a free online webtool that allows teachers to input all of his or her students and assign an avatar to each. This can be used to give points for things like participating, but it also has an option to click "random" where it spins a wheel at the bottom and selects a truly random student. This is a great upgrade on the tried and true popsicle stick method of choosing random students. It even allows you to assign negative points for behaviors that you would like to stop. Students and parents each have their own site they can access from home to track points.

As each student recited his or her poem, the class used CPS clickers to give the student a rating of 1 (very weak) to 9 (Outstanding). Overall, the classes scores were very close to the scores I had already given the students. They thought this was fun, and it certainly broke up the usual humdrum of listening to oral presentations for an entire class period.  In the end, students with the highest scores were assigned numbers and the class voted on a winner. We were able to see instantly the number of votes for each student, making the process of choosing a winner quick and easy.

Researching The Great Depression

To Kill a Mockingbird 
Preparing to read with a web-quest

Our class is about to start reading the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. But before we begin, the students need to know some basic information about The Great Depression. There is so much history and information that the students need to know, I am afraid a lecture from me would bore them to tears. That's where Edmodo comes in! The students completed a webquest using Google to find out how life was different in 1933 vs. today. Many of them were surprised to hear how high the unemplyment rate was back then! They also looked up major events from each year following the stock market crash of 1929. 

Students used a timeline from PBS to find out about important events, and each group picked one for each year. It was interesting to see how different groups chose different events as important.

Example from Edmodo

Once they finished the webquest, students went on to the New York Times website to view a slideshow of photos from The Great Depression. They chose one photo and wrote a paragraph explaining why they chose it and how it would feel to be the person in the photo.

Overall, this lesson served as a great introduction to The Great Depression where students were able to gather their own information and compare their lives today with those of the people who lived then. There is a great deal of talk today about how bad our economy is, but many students were able to see how lucky we are after researching this time period. 

Student Examples

Using Instructional Technology in the Classroom

For my current grad class, I needed to create a professional development for some of my co-workers. I decided that making a website detailing how to use some of my favorite technologies would be my best option.

Below are some step-by-step guides to using Edmodo, Poll Everywhere, and Quizlet in the classroom that I created for teachers to use. I made these for  for a project on educational technology. Each of them has screenshots with directions on how to sign up and use the tools. Let me know what you think! These are directed towards teachers, student guides coming soon!

EdTech How To Website

Using Edmodo in the Classroom by mrs_garst

Using Quizlet in the Classroom by mrs_garst

Using Poll Everywhere in the Classroom by mrs_garst

Poetry Out Loud in the Classroom

Our school participates in the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. This is a several-weeks-long project where students choose a poem from the official website, memorize it, and perform it in front of the class. 

The first step is for students to choose a poem. They go to the Poetry Out Loud website and choose from thousands of available poems. Once they chose their poems, they uploaded them on to Edmodo. 

After choosing their poem, the students went back to analyze it for meaning. First, they created a poster that showed the poem on one side, a visual representation on the other, and a summary on the bottom. Several students sid that this helped them to figure out what their poem was about. 

Choosing a Poem

Analyze It!

Next, students took their analyzing skills one step further. They wrote their poem on one side of a document and then re-wrote the poem in their own words parallel to the original. This way, students could figure out how to adjust their tone while reciting it. 

Student Examples