Hard Work Awards and More

Hard work is paying off for students on Team Cryer/Kafkas! Beginning

last week Mr. K and I have been looking for students who are showing an effort to stay on task, complete their work, do quality work and be responsible and respectful!

At the end of each week we announce those students and invite them to our Hard Work Lunch Bunch on Friday. Each student also receives a special certificate of achievement to bring home. Students are considered based on their own work and are not compared to other students. Students can earn the award every week if they continue to show great effort and/or continued improvement.

In our first two weeks we have seen a number of students really step up! Our hope is that we will have EVERY student in both classes in for lunch with us!

Reading logs!

I came across a new kind of reading log I have asked our students to try out. Whooo's Reading (also known as learn2earn) gives students a chance to earn virtual coins by reading and writing about their reading. Each time a student logs reading time they earn some coins. When they answer an open-ended question about their reading, they earn more coins. Finish a book? Yup, more coins! There are a lot of ways students can continue to earn the coins and teachers can award coins as well. With the coins students purchase accessories and items for their owl avatar on their accounts.

Students can even write book reviews they can share with otherr students.

When I showed the new log to students they seemed quite interested. I have had a few students log in and record reading, but not many. Students can use this in addition to or instead of the form they have filled out throughout the year. Personally, I like this one even better!

All students have their usernames and passwords taped to the fron of their white binder. If you can't find it, just send an email and I will send it right back.

The Monster Exchange

I absolutely love this time of year because I have time to teach my Monster Exchange unit on descriptive writing!

For this unit students are asked to draw a monster of their choice. Then they must write a description of it using great adjectives that we have discussed in class. That description is woven into a Monster Under The Bed or In the Closet story and shared with a partner class via the Monster Exchange website.

Once that exchange is made students try to recreate their parnter's drawing using only the written description! We then get to see how close the two drawings are and discuss what might have made it easier to match them up.

This year I am especially excited because we are joining a class from the school in Hollis, Maine where I worked before coming to WES along with a very unique class of students who live on a ship called the Africa Mercy.

This is one of several ships owned by an organization called The MercyShips, which travel along the coast of Africa giving medical care to some of the world's poorest people. The students we work with are the children of the almost 400 volunteers and crew who live on the ship.

Their teacher has been on the ship for 1.5 years. Currently the Afrika Mercy is docked in Madagascar and will be there until June 15, when the ship goes into drydock for maintenance until August when they return to Mdagascar.

I created a short video to show a little about the ship. Additionally, here is a link to the Africa Mercy website where students can see images from inside the ship.

In class I showed Team Kafkas about 3 minutes of a 60 Minutes news story about the Mercy Ships mission. I will be showing the video and explaining our project to Team Cryer this week. Many of the students who saw the 60 Minutes video wanted to watch the rest of it. However, as the story is told, there are many images of children and adults with faces disfigured by non-cancerous growths that could be disturbing to some of the children. I decided I would send that link to parents, who then could decide whether to show the rest of it to their children. I feel the video is well-done and extremely informative. Here is the link: 60 Minutes about MercyShips