Dec 30 2008
A new idea for a New Year
Holidays seem to be the time for me to get new ideas for how I am going to approach my classroom when I get back. I tend to get these seemingly brilliant ideas and jump in feet first, learning from my mistakes the hard way as I go along. I have a feeling that I am about to do it again. (Nathan is now rolling his eyes and cringing but in fairness – he does exactly the same thing!)
I have this amazing idea to put together a little reading group with some of my students in the new year, a la literature circle idea. I don’t think that I will do it with the entire class to begin with…I have been burned before. As a little incentive to keep them going and on topic I will have them record their discussions about the novel. Ah! What would be even smarter would be to start with short stories, then if things bog down with the group we won’t be trudging through some lengthy tome. My plan is to then take the recorded discussions, and use them as series on the class podcast. I think to get it up and running I will start working directly with the during some of the independent reading time when the rest of the class is doing their silent reading. This is the time that I have been using for guided reading anyway but I haven’t recorded the discussions. I would love to see groups work independently on this but we have to start somewhere.
I will keep you posted as to how things are going. Hopefully the results will be up on Portable Radio at some point and my guided reading lessons will have a little more life to them.
Wish me luck. (I’ll need it).
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Jane, I think that you will have wonderful success with this plan! I will be doing pretty much the same thing in February with my class. I will be recording the students as they participate in a book club unit as part of their Moving Up With Literacy Place program. The recordings will form the basis of an entire podcast on MPRadio. I’ll let you know how it’s going when I get closer to the actual activities. Good luck!
Mike Poluk
http://www.mpradio.ca
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It is good to know about someone else out there trying the same thing. Let’s keep the conversation going. I will post my activities and would love to here about yours.
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