Read Aloud: La Luna

I created a youtube video of me doing my read aloud. Here is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3_hN4fRNTU

I think the biggest challenge I might encounter when reading aloud is students’ different exposures to literature. Kids bring their own background knowledge and experiences to stories read aloud and they all react differently. There is no way I could prepare for each students’ response to the book. Also, students can only sit for certain amounts of time and I feel as though society has fostered children to have short attention spans. Getting them to focus on a story for more than ten minutes is sometimes impossible. (And people wonder why students get super antsy and do a poor job sitting for an hour taking TCAP tests.) Children also no longer have any imagination! They never get bored because as soon a s they are bored an adult finds something to entertain them. They are in a world where everything is entertaining them. They don’t need to imagine or make up games when they can play video games that have already been imagined for them. I foresee this being a real problem in the future. Read aloud and reading in general is a remedy for this. Reading takes kids into new worlds where they get to use their imagination to furnish the universe. Read aloud is beneficial as a model for students to hear great reading. It is also just enjoyable. I tell my third graders when I am reading aloud as part of a lesson (as more of a think aloud) they need to be sitting up and focusing, but every day I do read aloud just for fun and the students can sit with stuffed animals and lay down on the floor and I turn down the lights. I want students to just enjoy the written word and use their imaginations.

Children's Literature Websites

One of the sites I found and really enjoyed is the site for Chris Van Ahllsburg. http://www.chrisvanallsburg.com/home.html

I love Chris Van Allsburg’s books. They are wonderfully written and beautifully illustrated. They also have great morals and themes that make them wonderful books for classroom discussion. One of my favorite books of his is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. This book lends itself to creative writing and there is a place on the website where students can actually submit the stories they have written to Van Allsburg.

Another site I found was Roald Dahl’s website. http://www.roalddahl.com/

It is very fun and interactive and I use it with my third graders because we do an author study of Dahl. They just enjoy getting to explore the site and all the interactive features.

More Websites: 

http://www.scholastic.com/home/

Scholastic has fantastic teaching resources available, many for free. Printables, daily starters, book clubs and videos are just a few of the things teachers have access to.

http://www.goodreads.com/

This site is not specifically for children’s literature. It is a book social networking website. I would show my kids how to use it and allow them to peruse it themselves. You put in and rate books that you have read and the site recommends books to you based on the reading you have done. This would be fantastic for reluctant readers to help them find appropriate and interesting books to read.

http://www.childrensliteraturenetwork.org/

This site has video book trailers that give a book talk to get kids excited about reading. It also has video interviews with authors and illustrators to get kids excited about writing!

A Book That Stands Out To Me

I absolutely love The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg. This book is a series of illustrations with a title and a picture caption. The pictures do not go together, but rather they are all pictures out of different books that haven’t actually been written. This book is fantastic to use with creative writing. If you put up just one of the pictures, all of your students could write a different fantasy story based on that one picture and caption. It could be a really cool lesson in creativity to share all the different places students took their stories based on the same image. It could also be a cool character lesson to show that we all have different backgrounds and have had different experiences and even though we are seeing the same picture, we are all seeing it differently. We are all unique and none of the answers are wrong, just different, and really great to share with our friends.

My favorite image in this book is titled A Strange Day in July. The picture caption reads, “He threw with all his might but the third stone came skipping back.” The picture is in black and white. There is a boy who looks to be about eight years old and a girl who looks six or seven. You can’t see either of their faces because their backs are turned to us. You can see just a bit of sandy beach at the bottom of the page. There are large rocks in the sand and some wild grass sticking out here and there. The whole top of the page is water, and the sun is shining on the water so spectacularly. There are sun spots glistening all over the water so that you can tell is a sun shiny day. However, neither child is dressed for a day at the beach: the boy is wearing long pants and a long sleeved shirt. The girls is wearing a fancy light colored dress. It looks like she could wear it in a wedding or to church on Sunday. Both of their hair is shining in the sunlight as well. There is one rock hovering over the water. You can’t tell if it is skipping away or towards the beach. 

My Favorite Childhood Book

I have many favorite books, but I think I have to go with the Harry Potter series as my all time favorite. I can’t pick just one since the whole story is really what I love. I began reading these books when the third book came out and I was 11 years old. I really feel like I grew up with them since the last book wasn’t released until I was almost 20. I read my copy of Harry Potter 4 so many times that it is currently being held together with duct tape.

If you have been hiding under a rock for the past 15 years and haven't heard of Harry Potter, it is a series about an orphan boy who discovers he is a wizard and is shipped of to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to learn how to be a wizard. He often gets himself into trouble and comes face to face on many occasion with the most evil dark wizard of all time, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, aka Voldemort. Besides Voldemort, he has lots of enemies and conflicts as well as some amazing friendships with the most peculiar of people.

The Harry Potter series is a wonderful story of friendship and perseverance and adventure. While the blockbuster movies did a good job, I still think they are nothing compared to the magic of the books. I have often heard of controversy surrounding Harry Potter and people not wanting their kids to read it because it is about witchcraft. I think that as long as we talk to our kids about fact vs. fiction there is no reason they can't read books like Harry Potter. 

Google Apps Reflection

I did not like working with the classroom 2.0 blog platform. It was one I was previous unfamiliar with and I found it difficult to use. Some of the more dominant blog sites I have found are more user friendly.

          There are so many Google Apps available that I definitely do not know all of them exist. The ones I have worked with extensively include Google Docs/Drive, Google Calendar and Gmail. All of these are used my entire school to help us be more productive. Instead of printing a million forms for the teachers in my school to use, we just put the form on Google docs and anyone who needs it can print it off. We also use the shared portion of the calendar to keep our work calendars aligned. I would like to work more with Google forms and Google sites. I have created both forms and sites to use in my classroom this year, so we shall see how that turns out. I am hopeful for successful immersion. I could also use a Google site to communicate with parents about what is going on in the classroom. I use my Gmail to send communication to parents weekly and keeping all of their addresses in a Gmail mailing list is extremely helpful.