Glogs, Flipcharts, Movies and Reading Strategies Oh My!

Today was another full day of Professional Development. However, today was filled with lots of ways to engage and motivate students through technology and fun hands on activities.

Session1- What's New in ELA?

This session focused on Glogs. They introduced the benefits of creating Glogs and how to get to the Glogs created on each Unit of our Treasure books on our school website. These ladies worked hard over the summer to link Discovery Education videos, crossword puzzles, powerpoints, links to Treasure activities and links to inquiry lessons that go with each story. These Glogs will foster teamwork, drive new interest levels around subjects, and bring a fun learning experience to the classroom. Click here to access the Glogs.

Session 2- Flipcharts

This session focused on flipcharts created by one of our Tech Integration Specialist for 4th grade. She created flipcharts that included engaging lessons for each Unit of study in our Treasures text. The flipcharts included pre and post assessments, a vocabulary activity, art integration, comprehension skills and a Spelling lesson. The flipcharts are mostly geared toward small group instruction, but can also be used for whole group. Sorry can't share these, but the one thing that I can share is a website called Flocabulary. Flocabulary produces educational hip hop music to teach vocabulary, reading, social studies, math and science. My students are going to love this site!

Session 3- From Moaning to Motivated with Movies

This session focused on using Technology to motivate students to write. Some helpful websites that were introduced were Moviefone, You Tube and iTunes. The first trailer she showed was "For the Birds", which was found in iTunes. This trailer would be a great way to get students to begin discussing feelings and emotions. This trailer is awesome!

The best movie shown and the boys in your class will love it was "Oktapodi". This movie could be used to get students talking about Characters, Problem and Solution. You could even introduce Cliffhanger.

She then introduced us to 4 Square Writing, which was new to me. I use Thinking Maps when teaching writing, but I loved the graphic organizer for 4 Square Writing because it was much more age appropriate.You can also use it to retell a story by changing the First to Setting, Next to Characters, Then to Problem and Last to Solution.

Session 4- "Centering" Around ELA Strategies

This session introduced Anticipation guides, which are great to use for making Predictions on a text or to Pre-assess what students know. Then was a Literary Report Card where students choose a character from the story and write three character traits to describe that particular character. They then find supporting details from the book to show why that character received that grade. The teachers or the students can decide on the grade.

Here are a few photos of the handouts that were given. Sorry! They are not the best pictures.

Anticipation Guide

Somebody/Wanted/But/So- ELA Strategy