Photostory

I think that Photo story is a great way for students to share something personal about their lives or a great option for teaching their fellow classmates about a particular subject. This is an engaging activity that gets students excited about learning and provides a great end product that can be shared with others. Photo story can be a great new innovative way to do show/share and tell in the younger grades without having to deal with animals coming into the classroom. This website is a wiki site that provides a great list of ideas that can be used to make a photo story.

When I finished my photo story I know that I felt that it was very easy to accomplish and something that I was excited to share with others. Now that I have had some practice creating a photo story I think that I will be able to improve the next one that I do. I thought that watching everyone's photo stories in the classroom was a great experience to see and learn about all the different videos that people put together. I learned that it is important to make sure that the voice is loud enough over the music that has been put on the video as well as for the video to capture the attention of the video.

Here is the link to my photo story that I created about the snowstorm last year.

Responsive Classrooms

Annandale Terrace emphasizes the use of a responsive classroom in all of the classrooms that they have. I think that his is a great approach to teaching and see that the students are excited to be in school. Responsive classrooms help children learn social emotional and academic skills. The teachers great each and everyone of their students before they enter their classrooms. I also see the teachers constantly helping the students think about the answer and not actually telling them what the correct answer would be.

In my fifth grade class the students doing the thinking is more obvious. I saw one great activity where the teacher had the theme of Think Different. For this theme he had each of the students create a poster that said Think ....... and then whatever word they wanted to describe themselves. The students then each created a self portrait with things about themselves to go around a picture of their face. The teacher then took these pictures and hung them outside the wall so students could guess and see if they could figure out which student had created which one. This teacher also gives students time to socialize for 1 minute with other students during the day. It gives the students a good break from their daily activity and helps transition to a different subject.

Here is a great video to watch about Responsive Classrooms and how/why teachers should use it in the classroom.

To see more about the responsive classroom and things that are included in it click on this link.