This is a special day - Leap Day.  How have you prepared to celebrate?

​What's that?  You didn't even see it coming?

Come to think of it, what exactly is Leap Day? Why does it only come in every fourth year?  And what will you be doing four years from now?

The last day of our conference will start off with keynote speaker Ron Clark.  I've written about Ron on a few occasions after visiting his school and his classroom in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2012.  I can't wait for Mr. Culbertson, Mrs. McCombs, Mrs. Mouton, and Mrs. Nold to hear him speak in person before heading to our final sessions of the conference.  I predict that Mr. Clark will definitely energize us for the day (although 7:15 comes awfully early in the morning!).

Here's a video introduction to this amazing inner-city school:

While I will be absent from our fourth grade class for a couple of days this week, I will be attending "classes" of my own, all focusing on writing.  While I love to write, I find it one of the most time consuming of all academic subjects, not to mention that it's difficult to teach, as well.  Nevertheless, I also love to learn, and I'm always on the lookout for innovative methods and ideas.  The sessions in which I have enrolled are as follows (along with their descriptions):

• Real Writing, Real Revision:  In order to create work that goes beyond the single-draft test essay, students need models and mentors in their writing lives.  This comes in the form of mentor texts, connections with favorite authors, and most importantly, from the lead learner in the classroom - you!  In this session, author/educator Kate Messner will share strategies for using mentor texts and connecting students with the authors whose books they love, and she invites teacher-writers to pick up their own pens or keyboards to experiment with tried-and-true author strategies for everything from brainstorming story ideas, to writing nonfiction leads, to revision.  Join Kate for a day of learning and writing bravely!

• Remembering Why We Do What We Do:  Taylor Mali has made a career out of saying things often “thought but ne’er so well expressed,” which is actually a popular definition of a poem.  A veteran teacher who left the regular classroom in 2000, Mali has nevertheless continued to teach.  He brings new ‘spires for your inspiration and new fires for your hearths, even if you can’t spell “education” without “cautioned.” 
  
  
• It’s Not a Bandwagon, It’s a Freight Train:  In this interactive BYOD [Bring Your Own Device] session, you will experience the blindingly fast freight train that is technology.  Barri, having just completed Apple Academy training this summer, will guide you through the tangled web of digital literacy and what it means to engage today's digitally literate learners.  With the help of her current student teachers, Barri will focus on apps and web-based tools that increase writing enthusiasm, participation, creation, and innovation.  This session will address the role of technology as a supplement to, and not a replacement for, quality writing, as well as how to encourage students and teachers to not only consume on their devices, but produce as well.

​

• Metacognition:  The Transformative Power of Reflective Thinking:  Do you want to foster metacognition in your classroom?  Do you need ideas to help students make this abstract concept visible and concrete?  In this session, you will explore the intersection of research and practice to generate lessons that students will love.  Tanny will walk you through the use of realia, images, sketches, and text to help your students understand what metacognition is and what it can do for them as readers and thinkers. Our students have brilliant thinking; let's help them reflect upon it and enable them to share it with the world!
  
  
• Making Content Count: Bringing Learning to Life:  Engaging students to use writing within all content areas is an effective instructional strategy that can bring learning to life.  Where does writing fit into your content instruction?  In this session, Jane, Beth, and Allison will address how to take students to a deeper level in all curricular areas by incorporating writing.  This workshop focuses on how student learning in the content areas can be enhanced through writing and technology integration.  Come join the presenters and learn how to make your content count!

​

• Improv and Ink: Getting Students to Write More So You Can Teach Writing!:  Do you know a student in grades 4-12 who refuses to write or doesn't write enough?  When students don’t write long enough writing samples, it makes teaching writing or assessing content knowledge difficult, if not impossible.  Further complicating this situation is the fact that the student's reluctance to write may be rooted in either social emotional or literacy deficits, and you often don’t know if either of these issues is present.  So, how can you help students increase the length of their writing samples?  Improv!  Yes, improv, those [three- to five-] minute, spontaneous and sometimes hilarious games seen on stage or on television, can increase writing fluency.  Improv takes students rapidly through a series of essential literacy skills, while simultaneously nurturing social-emotional skills that impact their ability to write.  In this engaging, experiential session, you will learn how and why improv so effectively and efficiently increases writing fluency.  Come to this session and experience the power and potential of improv as a classroom writing strategy.

• Teaching through Adversity: Facing Challenges and Making a Difference:  Ron Clark will share his journey from teaching in a low-wealth rural area in North Carolina to the inner-city streets of Harlem in New York City.  Along the way, Mr. Clark will share inspirational stories of how his students made outstanding growth in test scores, conducted projects that garnered worldwide attention, and were invited to the White House three separate years to be honored by the president.  Mr. Clark was the 2000 Disney American Teacher of the Year, and he has been featured on the Rosie O'Donnell Show and also the Oprah Winfrey Show, where Oprah dubbed him her first "Phenomenal Man." Mr. Clark has written three books about his teaching practices, The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child, The Excellent Eleven: An Award-Winning Teacher’s Guide to Raising Children Who Love to Learn, which outlines qualities and characteristics parents and teachers should have to instill success in their children and students, and The End of Molasses Classes: Getting Kids Unstuck, 101 Extraordinary Solutions for Parents and Teachers.  This book offers the Ron Clark Academy's 101 innovative and classroom-tested ways for improving America's schools and leading our children to greatness.
  
  
• Six Word Story, Six Unique Shots: Enhancing Writing through Multimedia:  Attend this session and explore an activity that brings the writing process to life with digital storytelling.  A simple six-word story, created as a video with six unique camera shots, allows students of any grade level to tell a powerful visual story.  In this presentation, Don will guide you through a unique project that addresses the fundamentals of media literacy, filmmaking, and the digital storytelling process.

​

• Using Technology Tools to Support the Reading Process:  Bring your laptop or tablet to explore a variety of technological tools that can be used to facilitate the reading process.  Using technology in instruction helps engage students as well as give them skills they will need in their 21st Century world beyond school.  Tools you will explore in this session include websites intended to help a reader find the next great book, technology for recording reading done and your thinking about that, and digital tools that allow you to share your reading experiences with others.  You will have the opportunity to try out each tool for yourself and to collaborate with colleagues to identify ways you might use each with your students to facilitate their independent reading.

​​​I tried to choose a diverse set of courses that would support my teaching style, while at the same time challenging me to improve upon my weaknesses.  I will be accompanied in some of the sessions by various colleagues of my fourth grade teaching partners, but I made choices based on my own preferences and needs and not based on whether I would be sitting next to people I know.  I'm hopeful that I can come back with an overwhelming amount of information and ideas to use in the future.

Five members of the Cecil Floyd Math League have qualified to compete at the regional contest in Bolivar, next month.  On Saturday, the team participated in the math contest held at Thomas Jefferson Independent Day School, here in Joplin.  For fourth grade, DANIEL and LYDIA scored quite well (just as they did at our first competition), qualifying for regionals.  Fifth graders WILL, BYLER, and ALISA will now join them.  Parents, I will get the registration information to your qualifying child on Monday.  Hoggatteer alumna MAYCEE qualified, as well.  Finally, my daughter has also qualified for her school, so I guess I will be attending the contest after all.  She constantly amazes us.

Since there was no awards ceremony this time, ribbons are forthcoming.  In the meantime, here are our successes:

Number Sense

• DANIEL - fourth grade, first place
• WILL - fifth grade, fifth place

Target

• LYDIA - fourth grade, second place
• BYLER - fifth grade, fourth place
• MAYCEE - Hoggatteer alumna, fifth grade, fifth place
• My daughter (representing her own school) - sixth grade, third place

Sprint

• DANIEL - fourth grade, third place
• LYDIA - fourth grade, fifth place

Sweepstakes (based on Team and Individual scores combined)

• ​AUSTIN, DANIEL, and KAIN - fourth grade, fourth place
• MAYCEE'S team (Thomas Jefferson) - fifth grade, fourth place
• COOPER, BYLER, WILL, and ABIGAIL - fifth grade, fifth place
• My daughter's team (Carl Junction Intermediate) - sixth grade, first place

Overall Individual

• DANIEL - fourth grade, second place
• WILL - fifth grade, fourth place

​Mr. Culbertson and I can't help but feel proud of all of our team.  Not only did they perform academically, but they continue to impress us with their maturity.  Parents, thank you for your support, as well.

I suppose that could be the title to a professional book about education - The Eclectic Teacher.  I've often thought of myself in that term - The Eclectic Teacher - though I doubt many would understand what that is unless I defined it.  I know there is already an Eclectic Approach to Teaching Language, but my tome would be more along the lines of an eclectic approach to teaching in general, that is, to use an varied menagerie of teaching materials and methods.

The truth is, the definition of my approach is continually refining itself as my collection of teaching tools and knowledge develop.

Some of the stupendous math afternoons we've had in class of late have reinvigorated some things about myself that I had forgotten, and with the professional development presentation I gave, yesterday, I was able to pass on some of those tried-and-true methods and beliefs to some of my peers.

The fact is, as an eclectic teacher, I would never aspire to fully use any program set before me, but I will easily promulgate particular pieces that fit within my own program.  I choose the parts that fit with my personality, my beliefs, and my needs, and then I marry them with the conglomeration of tools that have already been established within me.

I understand that my methods will not work for everyone, but I also understand the things that work for me.  To force my square-peg personality into the round hole set forth by a scripted program is simply ridiculous.

Thus, I am pleased that our district finally recognizes individuality among its teachers.

And that's why I was reminded of some of Dr. Fred Jones's Positive Instruction strategies when presenting our math lessons.  Positive Instruction provides the teacher with an ability to see and help more students in a shorter period of time. "Needy" perpetual hand-raisers are no longer enabled by the teacher's inclination to nurture. Instead, a teacher helps just enough to get a student over an obstacle before the student is back on the road to independently solving his/her problem on an assignment.  No longer are two or three chronically disabled students (academically speaking) allowed to occupy the majority of the teacher's time, and no longer do they get free solutions by taking advantage of the teacher's natural penchant to take them by the hand and lead them to the final results. (i.e., free answers without doing the work themselves).

At the same time, I can get a pretty good immediate feel for the abilities within my class by taking a close look at their work as they work it, and when something is turned in, I have already checked much of their assignment.

Educators interested in Positive Instruction, along with guidance in other areas (discipline and motivation) should check out Dr. Jones's book Tools for Teaching on his website.

To begin, students are given 1 minute to attempt a page with 44 problems.  Since we're in the middle of a major math unit about fractions, we started with 44 fraction problems.  After the minute, students grade their own papers in a very specific manner, with the teacher saying the correct answers and the students replying with "yes" when they have a correct answer.  As the teacher continues, more and more students drop our of the chorus until the last student reaches the end of his/her completed problems.  At the end of the session, students will finally complete another, equally-difficult sprint, and calculate their improvement.

I'm leaving out some of the steps, and you're certainly free to explore Mr. Davidson's website for more information.
Between the two sprints, the teacher leads the class in a physical activity that reviews the multiples of given numbers.  Hoggatteers seemed to really enjoy the physical activity that accompanied this, and they did quite well with saying the multiples as we did it for the first time.  I think they're even looking forward to the next time we do this.  

Sprints, while they may resemble traditional timed tests, are not traditional.  In fact, each step of the sprint is carefully calculated for a purpose:

• Making it like a speed race is to reinforce the idea that we are working toward automaticity.
• Instructing the class to work on the remaining problems after checking the papers, lets students know there's no reason to be lazy during the first minute, since they'll need to do the rest anyway.
• A brisk physical activity in between the two sprints, increases the heart rate and adds to the excitement.
• A slower cool-down activity calms the stress and decreases anxiety before the second sprint.
  
• Doing a second reinforces the concept of improvement.
  
• We celebrate success after the first sprint, and improvement after the second.  Both high achievers and students who improve can feel successful.
  

​
​While Mr. Davidson recommends doing sprints as often as daily, I will probably alter how we approach fluency each day.  If it works, we may do different sprints daily to reinforce some of those other skills students are expected to gain in the fourth grade (yes, even multiplication and division).

If you'd like to check out the lyric video of Fly, you may see it now on the Hoggatt-Made Videos page.  Parents, ask your child for the password.  KRISTA provides the main vocal track, with 13 of her classmates backing her up.  We're pretty proud of the results.