Fall 2014 Reflections Part One: Classroom Setup and Book Talks

Due to summer professional reading, EdCamps, the Scholastic Reading Summit and Twitter sharing/chats, I have incorporated many changes in my classroom, as well as enhanced former practices. So at the calendar year end, I feel the need to reflect on this school year so far. 

Classroom Set Up

My blogposts about this topic: July 24, July 30, August 27, Sept. 11

After seeing many tweets from educators who had transformed their classrooms into creative working spaces, I was inspired to do the same. First, I got rid of my cumbersome teacher desk. It opened up a good amount of space in my room to have three tables. We didn't have enough tables to seat all students, so I kept some student desks and clustered them together to form two more "tables." The desks are turned around so that they are empty and easy to move around. Students have areas around the room for their materials and there are no longer messy desks to clean! This new setup created spaces around the room for students to work, not just at the tables/desks. Our classroom library has a larger hangout space now too.

Book Talks

My blogposts about this topic: July 17, Oct.17, and Nov. 26

Going to Alice Ozma's workshop on Book Talk Clubs at the Scholastic Reading Summit this summer was motivating, as well as challenging to me. How would I make this work within the school day, during Reading Workshop? 

I announced the opportunity to students and those who were interested met with me during workshop time once a week. They were given two weeks to read their books and then students wrote drafts of their book talks. It was interesting to watch students give each other feedback. They were able to successfully identify what needed improvement in each other's writing and give advice on how to make it better. Once revisions were complete, an educator from the local television station came to teach the booktalk club how to use the film camera and edit their talks. The talks were then posted on YouTube. 

http://youtu.be/V3OPctwlYME

I am pleased with how the first round of book talks went, and now we are tweaking and changing things up for round two! Incorporating QR codes on books in our library that link to videos and audio book talks is one project in the works. 

I will share more reflections in the next post which is all about self-directed learning. I may do a third post about math and other topics as well.