Week in Review

It was another wonderful week in Room 200!

With 2 full weeks of school now under our belts, we are feeling more and more like 2nd grade experts. 

We have spent the first two weeks getting really good at our routines, expectations and new tools to help make our entire year successful and seamless. 

We have moved on from our Digital Citizenship Boot Camp and are now learning some of the new tech tools that we will use often this year. 

We started with a great app called ScreenChomp (free). Screenchomp is a great screencasting app that allows us to record our voices and show our thinking on the screen at the same time. 

This app is a great example of my tech philosophy. The students in Room 200 will be spending their time using our creative apps. The apps we use will be usable in all subject areas and any given time.   Our goal is to become experts at sharing, discussing and presenting our thinking.

We even Tweeted with the app developer for Screenchomp!

Check out this amazing ScreenChomp: 

http://www.screenchomp.com/t/EWCTymt0Zr1Z

Writing:

Writing time in our room is often one of our favorites. It is a chance for us to spread out, relax and get comfortable writing our thoughts. In our Writer's Workshop, like many other parts of our day, we don't have to stay in our seats. We can get up and work in a more comfortable location if we choose.

We also spent this week getting to know the Writing Process and what it takes to be a great writer. We focused on the first three stages of the Writing Process and learned a few new vocabulary words along the way. 

This week's words:

• Prewriting - forming our initial ideas or brainstorming
• Drafting - initial writing phase
• Revising - improving on our writing ideas

Revising is often the most difficult stage for any elementary student to understand and complete. Buddy revising is even trickier because you are adding in the "friend" element. However, "tricky" doesn't scare us in Room 200! We dominated our buddy revising tasks! Check it out:

Revising from LBright on Vimeo.

Finally this week, we explored another one of our creative apps called PicCollage (free). This is a poster/visual presenter app. It is great for categorizing, making info-graphics and creating exciting educational posters. 

We used this app to help us share our learning about our Daylilies project. They are still a work in progress but they are coming along nicely. 

We also used PicCollage to finalize and publish our Declaration of Awesomeness. *name credit goes to L.W. from Room 200

During the very first few days of school, we started the process of creating our Declaration of Awesomeness by watching this amazing Kid President video: http://safeshare.tv/w/HdkRhiJSOv

Then, we discussed Kid President's message.

Next, the students traveled to many tables to jot down their thoughts on our learning environment and mission.

Then, we took snippets from each table poster and used Post-its to gather our favorite and most powerful thoughts. 

It is just as important to show the process as it is to show the product. In Room 200, we focus on both equally. 

Finally, this week, these powerful thoughts became our final version of our Declaration of Awesomeness. This is how we have all agreed to learn and live this year. 

We hope you enjoyed our Week in Review. This week we will be continuing the writing process, finishing Unit 1 in Fundations and updating you on our Daylilies and gardening projects. Stay tuned!