20 Questions Live!

Over the last two weeks my kinders have been playing 20 questions with our twitter pals in Michigan.  I got this wonderful idea from an amazing kinder teacher, Matt B. Gomez.  Hop on over to his amazing blog for other incredible ideas.  Matt's Blog After reading his inspirational blog post and watching his video,  I decided to give it a try.  Both my class and our Michigan pals had an absolute blast.  I set up a simple google doc and shared it with the other teacher.  We agreed on a time and voila.... amazing, relevant learning with real world application.  My kids were completely engaged in the reading/decoding,  asking questions, answering questions, and learning digital citizenship!  We played one week with my class selecting a  Texas Longhorn as our "item" and our friends asked the questions and then the following week we played again with us asking the questions.  We had to guess a mitten.  This was so easy to set up and do that we are going to try some other versions.  Perhaps a game centered around math next time!  I have included the link to a video of my class answering questions the first time around.  Give it a try!  You can find someone in your building  or another school or if you have connections with other teachers in other states.  It is so fun & easy.

20 Questions video

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

Geocaching! How Fun!

Before Spring Break we had such a great time learning about Living and Non-Living things.  We really started out confused by some things.  For example...  Was the apple I ate for lunch living?  Isn't it a plant?  We quickly learned about the 4 essential questions we need to ask when deciding if something is living or not.  When I told the kids that we were going to use GPS to help us find things on our search, they were so excited to share their prior experiences and schema about GPS units in their moms' cars and Dads' phones!  They actually thought that I was going to let them each have a phone!  After I explained that we were going to use a different kind of GPS, they were ready to get going. 

I hope your enjoy watching our learning!