What are our students writing on Kidblog?

Kidblog is designed for primary and secondary teachers who want to provide each student with an individual blog. Students publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts. Learn more from Kidblog for easy and safe e-portfolios

Here is why my students blog…

1. Promotes collaboration
2. Establishes a home-school connection
3. Improves writing and digital literacy
4. Showcases student accomplishments
5. Gives students a voice
6. Teachers digital citizenship
7. Gives students a global and authentic audience
8. Creates a digital portfolio
9. Is cross-curricular
10. Develops critical thinking skills

Here are some of our primary students' blogs ...

New blog for Primary 6th grade:

https://kidblog.org/class/frank6th

New blog for Primary 5th grade:

https://kidblog.org/class/frank5th/posts

https://kidblog.org/class/frank6th

Students' Blogs from last years:

• http://kidblog.org/Franks-Class/ for students of Primary 6th Class.
• http://kidblog.org/Frank2015/ for students of Primary 4th and 5th Classes.

Primary 6th 2014-2015

Blog for Primary 3rd grade:

https://kidblog.org/class/frank3rd/posts

Santa Ana Primary 5 English Class

Santa Ana Primary 6 English Class

Santa Ana Primary 4 English Class 

Kidblog for easy and safe e-portfolios

Why Blog? Blogging Suggestions for Teachers

Using DUOLINGO as a Fun Summer Assignment

Duolingo is the world's largest online language learning platform. Duolingo for Schools is a platform created exclusively for educators, allowing them to access and keep track of each learner’s Duolingo progress.

Why don't use this amazing tool for our students in order to brush up and keep up their English language this summer? 

Duolingo turns language learning into a game to make it more fun and ef­ective. Students can learn languages for free while earning points for correct answers, racing against the clock, and leveling up. 

With this aim our student "play and learn" with this app that runs on every device, from smartphones to desktop computers (browsers Chrome, Firefox ...), including Android tablets, Chromebooks and Ipads.

Duolingo for Schools allows teachers to track their students’ language learning in one place, and gives them special access to parental controls and Duolingo activities designed specifically for the classroom. Teachers can also activate classroom-exclusive lessons specially tailored for students, based on the average student level of that class.

Happy Summer days always learning !!!!!

Project Based Learning and skillful thinking strategies

In this Project that is dedicated to Living Beings, we have implemented several thinking tools and strategies for learning, among others:

Sequence Chain

This detail-oriented graphic organiser helps students strengthen writing skills by identifying important story elements (key characters, setting, and chain of events) and write the important events sequentially. We have implemented this graphic organiser to develop two animal’s life sequences:

·         The Life cycle of an Animal. Depict a life cycle as a process: the series of changes in the life of an animal. 6º grade

·         Food Change. The sequence of who eats whom in a biological community. Beginning with plant-life, and ending with animal life. Primary 4th and 6th grade.

Parts-Whole Relationships

This strategy engages students in exploring the relationships between the parts and the whole of objects, stories, societies, ideas, etc. Students examine how parts contribute to the whole and how each part functions. They learn that objects can be easily taken apart and put back together again, while other objects cannot be taken apart and reassembled without damaging them. Removing one or more parts will usually change how the object functions. Primary4th grade

Open Compare and contrast

This strategy takes students beyond a simple list of similarities and differences.

It requires students to find similarities and differences and then to:

·         • Categorise them

·         • Assess their significance

·         • Look for patterns among them

·         • Interpret, evaluate, and draw conclusions

Students select their own factors to consider. As a result, class-wide sharing

results in many factors being considered and discussed.

The completed graphic organiser can be used as a planner for writing. Primary 3er grade

The Interactive performance of “Gulliver” English Theatre

The Interactive performance of  “Gulliver” was acted out last Thursday on Youth Centre (Casa de la Joventut). Both teachers and students fully enjoyed the play about the exciting adventures captured in the wonderful book by Jonathan Swift entitled “Gulliver’s Travels”.

As it is customary, “el Departament de Joventud de l’Ajuntament de la Pobla Llarga” Youth Department of Pobla Llarga organises theatre sessions for schools. The play is prepared in advance in class with didactic material, with audios of the songs, structures and expressions more frequently used, specific vocabulary of the work, physical activity and theatre scenes. We put language into context. All this with an approach based on communication, which aims to encourage students, involving them in dialogues, conversations, songs, etc., and other forms of communication.

After the performance, the students interviewed the actors asking about the play, how they prepare it, how many performances they do, their experiences on the stage, etc.

Book Review Writing

Our students read several “Graded readers” every term and later they do the book review of each one. Graded readers are "easy reading" books used to support the extensive reading approach to teaching English.

Reviewing a book helps a child’s reading comprehension. The purpose of book reports is to demonstrate that the books were read, to understand and write about what they have read. They are often done for an assignment. Book reports focus on the plot of the book. Our students after reading the graded book, they write the key vocabulary and look it up in a dictionary o translator app and then they write a sentence including this word or phrase.  They design the front page with a picture featuring an important event of the book. They also write about the CHARACTERS that appear (What happens?), the PLOT of the story (Who lives in the book?) the THEME (What is the book about at its heart?) and the SETTING (Where are we?). We use some graphic organizers to help students recognize those elements and provide a framework for writing the review. 

The programmable robots in our classes of programming and robotics.

The robots "Dash and Dot" that our students use in our robotic classes require a mobile or tablet to play and programme. There are several free apps for Dash and Dot all designed for specific learning. In our first robotic classes, we've used: Blocky, Path and Go.

Go

This app is the easiest to start with. You can interact with the robots, give instructions change LED colours, record your own sounds, drive Dash and get to know the robot.

Blockly

Blockly is the coding app, where you drag block and connect them to make Dash and Dot do things. Learning to code with a physical robot is fantastic, as you get immediate feedback on what you just created.

Path

This app uses a graphical interface to teach kids the concepts of robotics and coding. It is very visual and tactile as your kid draws a route for Dash on the tablet and gives commands.

For the first sessions, the students go through the user experience tutorial in the Blockly app. This tutorial will guide students through the different block types in the Blockly app, getting students familiar with programming in Blockly.

Once they have familiarised with the programming app, the teacher issues a small programming challenge for students to complete. Here are some Code examples for the challenges:

Introducing Computer Science and Programing with our students

Code Studio is the most popular coding platform in K-12 education. They offer fun introductory courses you can teach in a classroom. Students create programs with loops, events, and conditionals and write algorithms for programming task. For instance, in the “Maze lesson” students write programs (algorithms for the computer) that get a character through a maze. They’ll understand the importance of sequence in the programs they write; in the “Artist lesson” they write programs to draw different lines and shapes. Every lesson is monitored by the teacher who controls the student account and progress.

Through Google classroom the teacher  assigns activities to the students.

They can implement their knowledge about programming and computer skills to the robots: Dash and dot

The town where I live

Lesson Plan:
Students develop competence in Knowledge and interaction with the physical world by reading and
understanding different statements about a town and then writing a paragraph about their own town.When you are teaching places of interest in your local community it could be enriching to encourage them to tell personal stories about these places: The hospital I was born in, the park where I go skating with my friends, the cinema I go to with my dad, the train station where I say goodbye to my brother.
Level:
Primary grade 4
Objectives
To read and understand different facts and statements about a town.
To interact with classmates.
To write about where you live.
Target language
Vocabulary:
bus station, park, sports centre, swimming pool, train station; city, country, town, village; bikes, favourite places, festivals, gymnastics, kites, picnic, sports, transport, cinema, hospital, museum,
park, shopping centre,
Structures:
In my town, there is a bus station. Let’s go to the museum. I go to school on foot/ by bus.
I like taking photographs. Is there a (cinema)? Yes, there is/are. / No, there isn’t/aren`t
There’s a/There isn’t. There’s a/There isn’t a park.

HEADLINES - EXPLORERS AROUND THE WORLD

In this project, our 6th-grade students become experts about famous explorers by reading interesting and important facts about those explorers and adventures. They write their adventurer's biography with a Headline. 

https://kidblog.org/class/frank6th/posts?status=published&status=review&status=draft&tag=explorers

The Headlines routine asks students to reflect and synthesize as they identify the essence or core of their biography and their discoveries.

Later, they share their findings as experts with the other classmates. The others students ask questions in order to know and understand what mountain, ocean, river, new land or even planet the famous explorer discovered.

https://kidblog.org/class/frank6th/posts?status=published&status=review&status=draft&tag=explorers

The routine asks a second question that involves how students' ideas of what is most important and central to the topic have changed over time: How has your headline changed based on today's discussion? How does it differ from what you would have said yesterday? Then they share their headlines with their classmates.

Student responses to the routine are written down with the explorer biography in our blog: https://kidblog.org/class/frank6th

Headlines. A routine for capturing essence 

Project Geography at the English Class

Students at Primary 4th Grade have been studying the Planets and the Solar System in our Geography Project. They have learnt about some important features of the planets, our star, our moon and others planets' moons or satellites. Our learners have found out important new features of our planet and have explored our solar system. Then, after reading new information, watching a video, listenings, and having a class discussion at the end of this process, we took advantage of the thinking routine:

I Used to think..., now I think... A routine for students to identify how their thinking has changed over time. 

This routine helps students to reflect on their thinking about this topic or issue: "the solar system" and explore how and why that thinking has changed. The purpose of this activity is to help them reflect on what they have learnt about the planets and to identify how their ideas have changed after studying them. 

On their Blogs, you can find what they have learnt and what new information they have discovered and how their thinking has changed about this topic.

https://kidblog.org/class/frank4th/posts?status=published&status=review&status=draft&tag=the-solar-system

More about Thinking routines:

Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn.

Category Archives: Visible Thinking