Online Hours - June 6th - 30 minutes

Today, fueled by coffee (today was a two cup day), I again started out purposefully on my online hours journey and again got a little off track.  I was looking up Kelly Gallagher's Reading Reasons to see if I could just find a list of mini-lessons (rather than having to buy the whole book.  No such luck.  I will be buying the book later on today and plan to read it for the rest of my time for this class.)  I did run across a few of his mini-lessons one of which I already use in my class - The Reading Minute.  I re-read how he implemented that in his classroom.  I plan to use this again this year, but I am going to stick more closely to his procedure of having kids summarize in one sentence (so it doesn't take up so much time) and by broadening the type of pieces I share.  Previously, I have stuck primarily to non-fiction news type articles, but I am going to vary that up a little with poetry, short pieces of fiction, facebook posts, etc.  I am also going to have kids sign up to share articles throughout the year which is something I have not done before.  I believe that this will be very powerful and will promote that choice piece that is so important.  I hope to create a positive, sharing culture in my classroom this year no matter what kids are reading.  I then went to Kelly Gallagher's website and read a couple more articles that he had posted.  One was about Facebook, Twitter, and kids - how these "damage" kids' brains.  This was interesting but not surprising to me.  I know kids process things differently in this digital age.  This article reinforced that by saying that kids these days can't sustain to any tasks for very long because of how much they consume information.  This makes my job as a teacher more challenging.  I have to find ways to teach them to attend for longer periods of time when everything else they do in their time away from school fights against that.  Yikes!  Definitely food for thought.