Podcasting in Kindergarten!

So  I use several methods to communicate with parents about our classroom activities but i still had trouble getting some parents to "seek" out my weekly update.  They were just passive about it.  Then one day during snack time, one of my students asked me what I was typing up.  I explained that I was sending a message to his parents about what we were doing during the week and what we would be doing the next week.  He then looked at me and said, " Can I help?"  That blew me away!  That was it.  Surely I could get parents to seek out the weekly news if their own kids were the ones giving it to them.  Now the question was....  how do I get 5 year olds to send out weekly news?  I didn't want them to have to write it and then correct it so that it was legible.  They would be much better at just verbalizing it.  That is when I decided to try weekly podcasting.  Each week,  we brainstorm the weekly news and announcements as a class.  We use shared & interactive writing to compose the news and then I select two "guest podcasters" for the week.  They rehearse their readings in small group with me and then I use audacity to record them.  When I am finished and have saved the file as an mp3,  I upload it to  edmodo.  The kids are super excited and always go home and get their parents to log in and listen.

If you don't use edmodo,  you could always use podbean.  A player is available to place on classroom webpages or blogs.  Of course, it is always an option to email the mp3 file to parents.

Try your hand at podcasting!  It is a super fun way to give your kids a real world application of reading, writing, and speaking.

AdamsKinderBuzz

Cheers,

Ellen

The Gruffalo & Animoto

My techno-babies absolutely LOVED the book The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson!  I used this book to work with them on the skill of visualizing the character & setting, using describing words,  and making character maps.  First I read the book but stopped short of the part where the mouse actually sees the gruffalo.  We discussed, drew, and charted (using shared writing) and used the text to prove what we knew about the gruffalo.  We then continued reading to confirm our thinking.  The kids were absolutely amazed with how close we came to the actual revealed creature!  Next we each made a cut out gruffalo and watched the video.  When their artwork was finished,  they took pictures of them, uploaded them to animoto.  Then,  I made a bulleting board of their work and  I compiled them into a short video to share them with parents. Easy Peasy.  If you haven't tried,  animoto.  I highly encourage you to give it a try.  

Enjoy, Ellen

Teacher organization part 2

One of the things that I dread every year is organizing parent volunteers.  There are so many events to coordinate throughout the year and there are many many parents who would love to give up their valuable time to come up and help.  Field trips, science lab, carnival, class parties, parent readers, parent teacher conferences...  you get the picture.  In the past,  I have given some of the sign up jobs to my homeroom mom and sometimes I have done them all.  Very often, I became overwhelmed with keeping track of all the dates.  This year I decided to try sign up genius.  Wow!  Can I say how much I love this?  I created sign ups for all my different needs and then asked the parents to sign up for what they wanted.  I sent the link out by emails and I posted the links to my website.  Gotta love technology that makes life a little easier!

http://www.signupgenius.com/

Sharing work with parents

I love this quick and easy way to share our work with parents.  The kids did a fabulous job learning how to create character maps in their journals!  I simply snapped pictures with my phone, uploaded them to www.animoto.com  and created a quick video. I then emailed the link to parents.   Since they do not take their journals home,  parents would normally miss out on this fabulous work.  Pretty painless... and the kids LOVED seeing their work in video.