Online Hours June 5th - 3 hours

Nap time today was a beautiful thing - a time for me to get a big chunk of my online hours completed, and I thoroughly ENJOYED getting the work done.  I started off my time by thinking that I was going to read through some of the articles I bookmarked yesterday, but, as often happens when using technology, my attention was diverted and I took a different path.  I opened up the course reading list and saw the Kelly Gallagher list of "Articles of the Week."  What an amazing resource!  I found myself sucked into reading many of the articles listed on the first page to determine which ones I could use in my own classroom.  I then went through his archives to find even more articles.  Before I knew it, two hours had flown by and the kids were up.  No matter.  I could still work while they were playing, right?  I was on a roll! Fortunately, I have great kiddos.  Norah only messed with the keyboard 25 times (give or take a few) and Vivi and Norah only argued over toys once or twice (okay, really quite a bit more than that, but I am a mom - a professional multi-tasker!  I handled this with ease all while absorbing all of my new-found knowledge).  Anyway, back to Kelly Gallagher........I think I might try this approach next year - doing an article a week to deepen the background knowledge of my students.  That's a good transition to the next thing I did which was reading another article in the reading list about how important background knowledge is when teaching literacy to kids (the article was There's No Such Thing as a Reading Test).  Great article and reinforced what Kelly Gallagher's article of the week assignment is designed to do.  I then finally went back and read through the New York Times articles that I had bookmarked yesterday to see which ones I would like to use in my classroom.  There are so many great pieces of high-interest non-fiction out there for the kids.  My mind is racing.  I need now to develop lesson plans for some of these articles.  That will probably have to be done tomorrow as I should pay attention to my kids now.  I might actually be getting excited about this Common Core thing.  :)


*This represents me getting excited about technology, reading, and the Common Core