Week Three

Wow!  This past week was a crunch week and now this week is setting itself up to be rather frustrating (I have to be out later in the week for bus driver training).  But that being said, life is still good!

Holidays really wreak havoc on an A/B type of schedule.  It cuts a day out which sets one group behind if you don't go at it from another direction.  I'm having a hard enough time keeping four groups together.  I've never been able to do that in the past.

Luckily we blitzed one day (saw all four classes).  So at the end of the week I had seen all groups pretty much equally.  We worked in small groups and rotated through stations.  It worked pretty well, but I need to be careful about time.  

In one station they worked on their blogs on Imbee.  During another station, they started working on their PBwikis.  Each group updated something either on their team page or on one of the pages in their team folder.  I've also added a slide show from Friday's activities to the wiki.

The other two stations involved comparing rivers to poetry and Haiku.  The kids seemed to like the combination of moving through the stations and the additions I added to each.  For example in the Poetry is a River, they had to read a passage, listen to a poem on mp3 players, and then write.  The Haiku station involved thinking about what must have happened to inspire haiku.

Thursday we went to Wilson Creek.   The kids got to get into the creek and do some water testing, hear about the history, and do some reflective writing.  For some of them the writing was excruciating.  I can't wait to get back to the memories they wrote about!

Friday we worked our way through poetry knots.  I've posted the slide show I made on the wiki, on my website, and I'm putting it here!  This week they get to put what they learned into action!  Here's hoping for the best!