Back In Business

Wow. It has been quite awhile. In kindergarten terms, it has been quite literally forever since my last blog post.

There is a reason, though.

I moved.

I could bore you with details of the transition itself, but I won't do that. I'll just tell you that I was given a wonderful opportunity to teach at a great new school, and I went for it. My family and I packed a U-Haul truck (could've packed two...one for home and one for school) and we moved 12 hours away. Throughout the entire transition I decided not to post on here. I still had work to do at my old school and there was always a chance that something could go haywire in the transition process. But now here I am, a John Rex Rocket, starting another school year in kindergarten.

My new teaching home...John Rex Elementary,
nestled right in the middle of downtown OKC.

The first week was full of procedures and the kiddos getting used to me. This is a long process, with many kids wondering why they have the "boy teacher", but it's fun to see their little attitudes change when they see my personality and how much fun we can have.

Of course, they had to be introduced to my friends Dot & Dash (our robot friends from Wonder Workshop), and they were beyond excited to drive them around and get to know them. Seeing their excited little faces as they realize that they can actually operate robots never gets old. I actually used Dot & Dash on "Meet Your Teacher Night" as a kind of ice breaker. The kids loved them (and some of the parents enjoyed playing with them, too). It really helped calm the atmosphere a bit in my opinion. Of course, I may have been the only one in the room who felt like it was a little stressful in the first place.

We also worked on a few "About Me" projects. My kindergarten team wanted to measure the kids, marking their height with a rocket that they colored (since the school mascot is a rocket). I had a random, long, piece of white board that I dragged with me in the move. It was a leftover piece from when I had some custom white board cut, about five feet tall, and a couple of inches wide. I'm sure the guy at the hardware store thought I was crazy when I wanted to keep it (and I'm sure that Mrs. Kindergarten Guy was cursing me throughout the move for bringing it along, but she had plenty of her own teachery items...I'm sure we can call it even). We ended up turning this piece into our own custom "measuring device" (tip of the cap to one of my good friends at TES), using a dry erase marker to mark each unit. We used chart paper to list various non-standard forms of measurement: pencils, blocks, cups, plates, cakes...the usual. We settled on (with some expert guidance from yours truly) using markers as our unit of measurement. We then used our custom ruler to measure the kids heights on the dry-erase wall in the hallway. That's right...the walls are dry-erase...can't wait to see all the ways I can use that!

I'm looking forward to sharing all of the new, creative and fun things that we will be doing in kindergarten this year, so check back in.

I'm back in business.

This Blog Just Ate My Robots

I write this post with a sore right arm from throwing playground balls and soccer balls around a gym. At indoor recess (for the bazillionth time this winter) I found that the kids loved chasing balls that I threw. I just threw them. They would retrieve them. They begged for it. I literally had a line of children waiting for me to throw a ball that they could chase. It had to look ridiculous to anyone looking through the gym windows.

Gotta love working with kindergarteners.

Robots:
As mentioned in the beginning of last week's blog post, this week we used Dash to "build" teen numbers. We set up six empty SOLO cups as bowling pins, and used a tennis ball as a bowling ball. Using Dash, we bowled the ball toward the cups, knocking some of them over. On the whiteboard, we had a full ten frame and an empty ten frame. In the empty ten frame, we drew circles corresponding to the number of cups knocked over. We then used the ten frames to figure out the new teen number.

Kid Lit:
Interactive books are so fun to read aloud. The kids get really into them...they'll even respond to questions or comment on things going on in the book. They love them. This Book Just Ate My Dog by Richard Byrne is on our list of favorite read-alouds. Bella loses her dog as he walks across the gutter of the book. Help arrives in various forms, but suffers the same fate as the dog. Bella needs the reader's help to escape the gutter of the book. It's a really fun read that draws kids into the story, and they love how it ends. My class begged to read this book over and over...so we did.

Smells Like Teen Numbers (KidLit and EdTech, Too)

This week in kindergarten-land was a crazy one. Between my being out a good portion of the week with sick kids, and all of our two-hour delays, it was hard to find any consistency, but we still managed to have a lot of fun learning.

Math this week was all about making teen numbers. We had already filled a ten frame, and now needed to use that knowledge to help us make teen numbers. As with everything else I teach, I try to change things up, finding different ways to to introduce a concept. We used base ten blocks and straws as manipulatives, we made anchor charts together and we used the lesson from our math series. We'll use the robots to practice the concept this week.

Dot and Dash:
We used Dot and Dash (our Wonder Workshop robots) to explore our new sight words for the week. Over the past couple of weeks, we performed a Control Challenge, where the kids practiced controlling the robot, moving him from one spot to another while learning the controls. We also performed a Precision Challenge, where the kids used Dash to push a tennis ball to a given sight word. This week, we combined the two challenges, as the kids had to drive to a given sight word, turn Dash around and push a tennis ball back to the starting point. This was really hard for them, and we'll probably try it again this week.

I love that by watching the robot, you can almost see the kids' brains working. Also, I thought it was really neat to hear the kids encouraging one another throughout this challenge. They really want each other to succeed, and try to help each other out as much as I will let them. It makes me feel like we've done a good job in Room 6A making the kids feel like they're all a part of a team.

One thing that I didn't get done this week was an activity practicing teen numbers. It's a pretty neat one that I thought of while looking at Make Wonder's challenge for the week: using Dash to go bowling. This week, students will start with the number 10 (showing a 10 frame on chart paper), and use Dash to "bowl" toward bottles or cups used as pins. They will add the number of "pins" knocked down to the 10 that they started with, telling me what teen number they made. More on this next week...

New Apps:
I don't have a full classroom set of iPads, but I do have enough for a couple of small groups, so I am always on the lookout for new iPad apps (some are actually new, while some could be considered "newly discovered"). These usually get tested on the kids at my house before they are introduced at school. I'll talk about a couple of them here:

Dash & Dot Rule My Classroom: My Experience With DonorsChoose & Two Adorable Robots

"Hey, Mistew Dicken."
"Yes?"
"Can I dwive that wobot?!"

The smallest and youngest little boy (usually unengaged, and without a single care in the world) in my kindergarten class was beyond excited. I had just introduced my kids to Dash & Dot, Wonder Workshop's pair of blue and orange robots, designed to help teach young kids the concepts of coding. I showed them a YouTube video to announce that we would be getting a pair of the robots for our classroom. Clearly, the video had created a buzz of excitement, as very few (if any) of my students had seen a robot before, in the flesh...er...metal? Gears? Whatever.

I had read about these robots while looking through Twitter, and then Googled them and read some more. New to the education scene, the robots were getting good reviews among educators who were incorporating coding into their classrooms. I knew that I could not fund the project, and I knew that the school could not fund the project, so I decided to try out DonorsChoose.org.

It was Saturday, and I filled out the required information on the website, wrote the essay, answered some questions, and selected the items that I wanted. By Sunday night, they had posted my project, titled, Dash & Dot Are the Secret to Kindergarten Coding. By Monday afternoon my project was fully funded (thanks to two generous donors). That evening I answered a few questions to confirm the materials list, and the following day the items were ordered and shipped from the seller (Amazon.com). It was then that I showed the kids the video, and mentioned that they would arrive in a couple of weeks.