What I Will Definitely Do Next Year

Finding Joy in 6th Grade has created her first Linky party with a Giveaway.  

The Linky Party is "What Will I Definitely Do Next Year? "

I've been out of school since May 17th and just got back from Destin, Florida on our first family vacation of the summer and of course I am already thinking about what I will definitely do next year with my 4th graders. While there are so many things I plan to do, here are a few things that I definitely plan to do next year.

The first is getting my students involved in Edmodo.  I began using Edmodo with my 4th graders two years ago and decided to put it to the side this past school year because I wanted my students to devote more of their time in Kidblog publishing their writing pieces, commenting on other students' blogs and making their own blog posts. Throughout this past school year, I started to regret this decision and now I am definitely getting the students involved in Edmodo for the upcoming school year.  I love using Edmodo with my students for the following reasons:

• It is a great communication tool.
• Students can practice responding to texts, videos or other's posts and get immediate feedback from teachers or their peers.
• Collaboration with other classes on book studies
• Communicating with our pen pals.
• Back channeling during Mystery Skype Calls.
• Communicating with our Trucker Buddy.

Edmodo is a wonderful technology tool to keep students engaged and as it states on their homepage "It's where Learning Happens." 

 This past school year students did respond to reading, but not enough. I would like my students to respond to their reading everyday and I plan to implement this into our daily centers as well as during our reading lessons. Students responding to their reading helps them develop a deeper understanding of the text as well as make personal connections. During the end of this current school year while reading The Lemonade Wars I had students respond to their reading by writing a summary of the chapter, answering higher order thinking questions, making connections and writing using vocabulary from the text. This upcoming year I plan to implement this at the beginning and continue throughout. You can check out an example of one of my student's notebooks here.

Finally, I plan to keep my class WIKI updated with homework using google calendar. You can check out my class WIKI here.