Countdown Photobooth

For the last 11 days of school we have been having a countdown. Each day we pop a balloon and in the balloon is a special activity for us to do the next day. Some of them have been reading outside, sidewalk chalk outside with new, special chalk and bonus computer lab time. Last week one of them was a photo booth. I brought in a backdrop and some props for the kids to use. It turns out grade 2 kids are THE BEST in a photo booth. The endless energy and creativity works quite well! As you will see, some of them LOVED being in front of the camera. It was up to the kids how many photos they wanted but everyone got in at least one shot (not everyone's photo can be posted to the blog). There are a few that are in about 60% of them! This was a blast. Enjoy!

What we are - growing up to be strong people.

Last week on the Day of Pink we talked and blogged about the positive traits we have that will help us grow up to be strong, caring people who stand up for others. We got all the photos together, here is our collage!

Growing Up to be Strong People - The Day of Pink!

Today was the Red Cross Day of Pink. Folks all over were encouraged to wear pink to take a stand against bullying. Why pink?

It started in 2007 when two high school students in Nova Scotia took a stand against bullying in their school. The students asked all of their peers to wear pink to school after they heard a male classmate had been bullied for wearing a pink shirt. To continue the momentum, the Canadian Red Cross Day of Pink campaign brings together schools and communities to wear the shirt and stand together against bullying. - http://www.redcross.ca/dayofpink/manitoba.asp

The children and I talked about this and started discussing the personality traits that we have that are going to make us strong people that stand up for others. We have also been listening to "What I Am" by Will.i.am (a lot, it's awesome) which talks about being a strong person. Awesome!

To pull it all together, each child decided which trait of theirs was the most important to them and we took a picture! We just need to snap one more photo tomorrow and our collage of anti-bullying, strong, supportive traits will be ready!

For now, here are a couple of samples. Stay tuned for the final product :)

You might be wondering, "how can 'fast' help us be strong people that can stand up for others?" like I was. The answer - if you see someone treating someone else unkindly then you can run really fast to tell someone and get help. I can't argue with that!

~Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Lots of New Books!

Well, not really lots of new books but it seems that way! Lately, many of our students have been discovering new books and authors that they love. The best part is that they are talking about these new books they love and the demand for them is spreading like wild fire! I must say, I am very happy to see something other than "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" floating around here!
We were talking at the end of the day about how we could share our new titles with our virtual audience using a web tool. A simple blog post is fine but a list we could add to continuously with our favourites is even better. As we were scrolling through the blog looking for a tool we had used in the past that would work for this, there it was, at the bottom of our page - our Shelfari! Of course! What better way than our Shelfari!
Mrs. Tresoor and I have been scheming about some "not a boring book report" tasks the kids could do when they are finished reading a book. I found this blog post that got me thinking about the cool ways students could respond to their reading. We want our students to be more accountable for what they are reading. We also want them to share what they are reading with their peers, just like they have been today, because we know how powerful peer opinion is when it comes to choosing a book. We both started with a "Now I am Reading..." chart in the room where students put a sticky note of the book they are reading. When they finish it, they give me that sticky note and put a new one with their title. Today alone, 11 sticky noes were handed in for new ones! Awesome.



The pile of sticky notes from TODAY alone!

 One of the "not a boring book report" tasks we have been planning to introduce was to write a book review on Shelfari (or chapters.ca or amazon.ca etc). Previously I have used our Shelfari myself, adding books that I read with my students, that my students read, that I read professionally and personally. This is probably why it sits there at the bottom of our blog, lonely and ignored. Now that I have used it with my students, they are more aware of it and will be much more likely to scroll allllll the way down there!
You can check out our Shelfari by scrolling down, all the way down (perhaps I should move it???) to the bottom of our blog. Or, you can click here. You will notice not all the books are children's books. I also post some of the personal reading I do here. I think it is important for my students to see me as a reader and see the books that I read when I am at home.
Stay tuned for the book reviews coming soon to our Shelfari!

A Proud Teacher and Welcome 2012!

Welcome to 2012! We all had a fanatstic break that came just in time. Yesterday we talked a little through the day about the good things that happened over the holidays. In some cases, I already knew what had happened for my students because they blogged about it over the holidays :) Nothing could have made me more proud and satisfied than to see my students wanting to write about authentic life experiences on their holidays! This makes the time and effort that goes to setting up and maintaining tools like student blogs worth it. Yesterday we got another surprise when Mason put through a post about his trip to Palm Springs. It was a surprise because I didn't know he was away but more so because he made an Animoto of his trip! Another proud moment because he is a) blogging on vacation, and b) using a tool (Animoto) that I have shown him but not necessarily used with him. He remembered it and figured it out on his own.

My holidays were fantastic, so much happened! I love it when Christmas is right at the beginning of the break because it leaves a whole 2 weeks for travel, visits and projects. This year it was visits and projects. At our house we are doing a big renovation and our whole main floor has been gutted! This means no kitchen and no bathroom, yikes! I was also able to spend time with my 4 nieces and nephews from Kenora snowmobiling, skiing, skating and at the circus (at the Manitoba Museum). Mixed in with all of this were some visits with friends and quiet mornings (away from the renos) with my new Steve Jobs book. It was great to come back to school feeling refreshed and ready to get going with some new ideas.

Have a great 2012!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Halloween Silhouette Art

This week we created Halloween silhouette art as seen on ThatArtistWoman's Blog. She has so many fantastic ideas and explains them all step by step. After I used the Artsonia app to load our artwork to our student art gallery, I created an Animoto video of our art work using the Animoto app on my iPhone. It was so easy to do, the only hiccup was that I couldn't rotate the photos so some of them are sideways :( Check out our video...

Plastic Bag Assembly Production

Tomorrow we will be having an assembly and sharing our Plastic Bag Round Up project with the school. They know it is going on because we have talked about it, advertised it and sent notes home but we thought we should share our progress.
Last year my students and I created a video for this same purpose. When I showed it to grade 5 to kick off and explain our plastic bag project this year, they immediately wanted to make one of their own. I thought this was a great way to introduce Animoto so that the students could use it on their own in the future.
We took photos and video clips during each of our bag counting days and started putting the video together as a class. Today, we did some more detailed planning using linoit, digital sticky notes, which allowed us to organize our plans as we brainstormed. Here is our final linoit product.

Before we got to this point, we had brainstormed all the things that needed to be included in our video production. Once we had all the ideas down, we were able to move them into the order we wanted them incorporated and decide who would like to be recorded saying each one. Once this was done, we grouped the notes to show who would record whom and talked about video recording skills. (Boy, when I put it all down in detail, we got through a lot!) The students recorded each other on our Flip cameras and voila! Our production! (Well, not quite just voila. I am finishing it off in Animoto due to our deadline of tomorrow.) We will post the video once we have shared it with our school community.

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

The Faces of Five

I just added a photo to the right side bar of our blog. Since it is a little hard to see, I am posting it here as well. I made this using a very cool tool called Shape Collage which is exactly what it sounds like. A shape that is a collage of photos!
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Diving Into Daily 5

This week we dove in to Daily 5. I used Daily 5 last year in grade 2 but it is brand new for our grade 5 class. Launching Daily 5 for the second time and in an older grade is a totally different experience too. We are having great discussions and everyone is quickly on the same page.

Our first choice is Read to Self. We have all agreed on the expectations and the kids were able to follow them amazingly, right off the hop. I am so happy that we seem to be a naturally engaged group of readers! I basically have to pry their books out of their hands when time is up.



Since Read to Self came so naturally and the kids were independent with it so quickly, I introduced our second choice this week as well - Writer's Workshop. This is one of my favourites because last year I had such a fabulous group of writers. They LOVED to write and we had so much fun exploring new ways of publishing. Once again, I am in luck! Our grade 5 community loves to write as well!

First we discussed expectations, brainstormed topics to write about and forms of writing. Today I released the authors and they dove "write" in. Again, when time was up it was music to my ears to hear the moans and groans because they didn't want to stop :)

Once again this year, I am really enjoying using the Daily 5 program and it is so neat to see that the students love it as much in grade 5 as they do in grade 2. Next week the students will post their reflections on the process of starting Daily 5. Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

First Day of School Traditions

Since I was little, I have always had a first day of school photo. Since I have been in school ever since (except for one year while I was skiing), I have continued that tradition and brought it to my classroom as well.

Jeff and I on the first day of school.

Our classroom community 2011-2012, grade 5 :)

We Are WAY "Awesomer" Writers!

Today as we get ready for our second last TWAS entry, we are taking time to reflect on how we have grown as writers. We are comparing our first TWAS entries to our latest ones and there are lots of things we are better at.

• We have neater printing.
• We skip a line before we start a new topic (we write in paragraphs).
• We write A LOT more.
• We add more detail to our writing.
• We write more topics.
• We use correct spelling of a lot more words.
• Sometimes we write to different people.
• Some of us write in full size notebooks instead of half size notebooks.
• We use punctuation now.
• We start our sentences with upper case.
• We leave bigger spaces between words.
• We type faster when we blog our TWAS so we can share more on our blog.

Here are some examples of how we have grown as writers:

iClassroom {Storykit}

We explore many ways to publish our writing in grade 2. A few students are working with Storykit, an app available at the app store. They write and edit  their story in their writers notebook and then move to an iPad to publish it. Text is typed in and then illustrations can be drawn write in the app or a photo can be used. Once the story is complete, it is shared online and can be emailed. My students are highly motivated to publish their writing using Storykit.

iClassroom {WordFoto}

This weeks app of the week on iTunes is WordFoto. I heard of it through a fellow educator on Twitter just last week! One of our classmates is moving to B.C. today so I just tried it out and made a "we will miss you" WordFoto for her.

To create your WordFoto you simply pick a photo from your library or take a photo with your device, choose the words you want to apply and presto! A very cool mash-up of words and an image. There are even different styles to pick from. It took a matter of minutes!
Here is another sample using one of our butterflies just before it was released into the real world.

iClassroom ~ Taking it Outside

We took advantage of the mobility of our iClassroom and took our learning outside. We had caterpillars in our classroom and wanted to do some refelcting about what we had learned so far about caterpillars and what we were still wondering about.


First, the children wrote in their writer's notebooks using a T-chart. When their thoughts were clear they video recorded their "knows" and "wonders" using the iPods and iPads. Each iPod and iPad comes with a still and video camera and records HD video.

Once all the recordings were synced to each device, students (grade 2) were able to use the iMovie app to put the clips together into a movie!
Note: all photos have been taken and processed with my iPhone using the instagram app.

-Leslie Dent Scarcello :)

Let Them Fly Free!

You may have been following our buterfly adventure on our Butterfly Page but just in case you haven't, here is our latest.
On Friday we released most of our butterflies. Here are some of our photos.

Skype + Daily 5 = Awesome!

Last week we used Skype again during Daily 5 for Listen to Reading with our buddies in Morris. It is incredible to me how quickly our 21st Century Learners/Digital Natives pick up these tools and use them independently. Sometimes with our network we have technical difficulties and I have an entire team of "technicians" ready to help or at least "suggest" what I am doing wrong! Ms. Martens and I get the call going and say hello, and usually some stories are shared between the classes. Then, the buddies that are reading to each other take it away, one after the other. It is awesome to me to see our classroom walls turning into windows.
The story that Carl from Ms. Martens class shared with us was very interesting!

May 18 - I went fishing in the ditch with my dad. There are fish in the ditch because of the flood. I caught three fish. One of them was huge. - Carl

I suggested that Carl should go with his dad to each of the ditches to save all the stranded fish! He didn't think that was such a great idea. We are happy for our Morris friends that they didn't have to leave their homes and that the flood water has receded for this year.
- Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Keanna was one of our readers, here with Sjusen in Morris.

Dancing in the Park

Yesterday we, along with half of the other grade 1-3 students in the division, went to the Folkdance Festival to dance in the park. This was my first time going and I thought it was the best thing EVER! What better way to spend a warm day in May than with hundreds of kids dancing to loud music in a park. It also helped that it is not yet bug season, there was some cloud cover to keep us cool and the temperature was warm.
- Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

A Chilly Day of Learning

Today I am at a technology conference in Gimli, MB. It has been excellent and I can't wait to bring some new ideas to our classroom. At lunch I went outside (very briefly because it is SO cold) so I could share my view with you. I hope you had a good Friday with Mrs. G!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

We Went to Fort Whyte...

As we mentioned a couple of days ago, we went to Fort Whyte. It was fantastic! We decided to use Voki to share what we saw, what we learned and what we did while we were at Fort Whyte. This activity was a blast!
When we got back to school, we brainstormed our ideas and took a photo of it with our iPods so we could save the ideas for the next day. When we were ready to write, each table had an iPod to reference the brainstorm session. We wrote our reflections in our Writer's Notebooks and made sure to include what we saw, what we learned and what we did at Fort Whyte. Each of us recorded our reflection using a digital voice recorder, created our avatar on Voki and uploaded our reflection.

Here is a sample of how it turned out!





Click on your name to see your Fort Whyte Voki.
Anna, Brayden, Noah, Brody, Matthew, Taylor T, Taylor P, Alyssa S, Alyssa P, Hailey, Haley, Cole, Carter Y, Carter F, Jayden, Madison, Morgun, Brooke, Keanna, Araya.

A Great Way to Spend a Tuesday!

Today we went on a field trip to Fort Whyte. This is one of my favorite places to go on a field trip, both as a student and a teacher. We will have more time tomorrow to post about what we learned, today we are going to do a Graffiti Reflection! Stay tuned to check it out. Also, families can stay tuned to our Shutterfly Album where I will post photos from our day.
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)