rcook

This project turned out great! We can definitely turn it into a routine for many of our stories. The students were asked to choose one of our recently read stories instead of making them use just one - Thunder Cakes. They all choose to use The Art Lesson from Tommy De Paola. They were then asked to use their journals to create a list of 10 questions to ask the character they are to interview. (Previously I had given the students sentence frames but giving them more freedom to create their own worked much better) After each student was done creating their questions they had to find a partner to practice with before recording (something I didn't do last year when I tried this project) When the partner team felt ready, they were to record their interviews using either Speakeasy or Voice Memo on the iTouch.

Here is a student sample.....

This was definitely a fun project that we will be using many time throughout the school years.

Students will use the Comprehension skill of Questioning to create questions for a character in their HM anthology book. We will use the story Thunder Cake in which a little girl becomes scared of the impending thunder and here grandmother lures her out of hiding by getting her to gather ingredients for the cake.

Students will create their own questions (which builds upon a previous project from last year in which the teacher used a more guided approach) and use Speakeasy or iTalk to record their interviews with each other.

Ok. After many tries and some luck, here is one of my student samples. Much explanation to follow!

This project was so much fun for my class. I first did a sample run with my small, higher leveled group during UA time. The class was so curious they asked to hear the recording and wanted to know how we did them. So I promised them we could do one the following week as a whole class. I got the Speakeasy to finally sync onto 5 out of 6 itouches and was able to have the students split into 5 groups in which they also recorded their predictions about our Anthology story "The Great Ball Game". The kids LOOOOVE it and want to do it for each story......... They created their own routine with the itouches...... HOW COOL IS THAT!

So, the bad points. Only with the application and the uploading of the final project. The Speakeasy I used originally last year, I tried to use this year not realizing it needed to be updated. After updating it, I had a difficult time getting the recordings downloaded. Tom helped me with that. I was able to finally save them to my desktop. Although the recordings from last years questioning project are saved in a file on iTunes. I am not able to transfer these new ones there. ????? Still don't know how but for the project I was able to upload one as a zip file into my blog. I guess I can just save them into a file instead of iTunes. It really wouldn't matter either way.

Maybe next time I will use a different recording app. I liked the Speakeasy last year because it was so easy to use but that has changed so I'll move forward and try some of the others. Live and Learn!

Students will use prior knowledge to predict and infer what will happen during a pre-read/picture walk of Possum's Bare Tail -which is a leveled reader. Using the ipods the students will record their predictions using Speakeasy. After the reading and activities students will go back and listen to their predictions to see if they were correct. This will be done with my small group of more fluent readers to increase their reading comprehension skills.

As a follow up activity: Students will be asked to write in their journals about what things they were wrong about and what the right story line was.

Students will record a summary of the HM 2nd grade story of Around the Pond in Keynote. Teacher will transfer the videos to iTouches for student review. Students then make changes and rerecord adding more details to their summaries.

First file is a recording of 2 students conducting an interview using Speakeasy on the iTouch- Questioning strategy from 2nd grade story Thundercakes.  Each student was an interviewer and an interviewee.  

2nd File is the interview sheet students filled out by themselves to use a a script. 

The process of using Keynote to build a fluency lesson for a story selection was fairly easy.  Although the lesson is completed and the students were easily able to follow how to do the lesson, I would like to now do a few things to it.  First, I REALLY need some equipment in my classroom, ie: a projector, maybe a doc-u-cam, better lighting (my lights are either on or off, no sections can turn off).  I wasn't able to show the lesson as I had planned due to not having these items so I changed the background to white and photocopied the log sheet for all my students and had them read out of their text.  I ran the rest of the project onto overhead sheets and showed one page at a time.  

I would like to change the vocabulary pictures so they "do" something.  Maybe make a noise, or move, etc.  I think I was so nervous at the first meeting, I missed all the cool things that Keynote can do.  Although now that I know, I can use this project to practice with.

This project is for 2nd grade but could be used for all grade levels to practice fluency.  Too bad I don't have more time because I would have liked to do this for more of the story selections.  Also, it's hard for the students because they only get a story for 7 days and then we are on the next story.  Maybe I could do something that includes all the stories somehow.  

I did get a good suggestion from the group I was in.  To differentiate, there are these "Story Summary" books someone created with easier and harder passages so that the lower readers could still use the vocabulary review on Keynote and read a passage at their level.

That's it for now!

I am using Keynote to increase vocabulary and fluency for story selections.  On Keynote, students will do a before and after read of the selection Officer Buckle and Gloria.  Students will study selection vocabulary and high frequency words after the before read and chart progress. They will also chart their progress after the 2nd read of selection.  Students will be able to monitor their own progress.