So much to do. So little time.

The title pretty much sums up how things have been for me lately.   Between work, online classes, two kids, a husband, and a dog.  I'm being pulled in a few different directions.  I'm actually down sick today at home.  With two kids, if one gets sick you can usually bet there will be a domino effect soon.  I've enjoyed every moment of my busy schedule,  and I'd much rather be too busy, than be bored.   However, having some down time to recoup from whatever this, is wonderful and much needed for me and my littlest.  With that said here are a few photos and snip-its of what I've been up to these past three weeks.

These 5th graders created an awesome marble run!

Elise and Avery (two partner team) and their marble run.

Our 5th graders Friday Clubs started.  This is from the Design Studio club.  Rachel Armstrong, Michelle Colte, and myself head it up.  The first meeting challenged students to make a marble run from PVC pipe.  This challenged students to collaborate with one another.  Our second meeting consisted of them getting their feet wet with Lego Movie Maker.  Again, the students did an amazing job expressing themselves with the materials they had at hand.  This third we asked students to make optical illusion art.  Our student Moses created a great pop out name art.  All the students did an amazing job!

Moses creating his pop out name.

The finished product.

Student making 3D hand art.

In my #IST611 class we have to do an assignment where we evaluate an application.  I chose Seesaw because many of the teachers work with it at our school as a way of curating student's learning.  Here is what Michelle Colte and I came up with to get ready for our school wide #DotDay16 celebration. These are 2nd graders from Mr. Russell's class utilizing Seesaw to analyze and reinforce our reading of "The Dot."

All of the students did an excellent job making their dots and it was fun to see everyone's interpretation of what their dots would look like.  I was excited to see student's accessing the application on their own by using the QR code.

Below are a couple of pictures from our #DotDay16 celebration on September 8th.  This day celebrates creativity, collaboration, and individualism.  It's a great way to connect a story to an event.  Dot Day this year had a couple of theme's running through it.  Students could make an outline of their hand and fill it with dots, make a parrot out of toilet paper tubes, or learn to talk like a pirate. We included the pirate theme since our Book Fair coming on Sept. 26th is Pirate themed!  It was a great way to do some advertisement out for the Book Fair.

Students at our Shark photo op.  

Some of the participants at #DotDay16

Fifth graders have been working on Explorers for their history projects.  Mrs. Colte and I decided to do an exercise that incorporates visual literacy.  We asked students to look at a photo of Christopher Columbus's landing from a textbook and document what they saw, questions they had, and what they thought.  Some of the inferences students were making was amazing!  They were taking the exercise so much further than I thought they would.  I loved seeing one girl in Ms. Park's class accessing her background knowledge of the names of the ships that landed.  It was a great exercise and I would like to see it be taken a step further by having students compare two pictures, one from a textbook and one from a painting that is maybe more realistic or has different visual elements.

5th grader making an inference based on an interesting shadow.

Below is a document I created in Google Docs that can be used in future exercises.

     
Here are a couple of pictures of students writing down the information they saw and accessing their background knowledge when making inferences about the painting.

I loved seeing this student accessing her background knowledge!

In addition to working I've also been taking classes to get my school librarian certification for New York state.  For my IST668 class Literacy Through School Libraries I had to create a Wix Website that will start outlining my plan for my literacy program once I have a library. If you would like to take a look you can find the link below!  Any feedback is appreciated or just talking library!

 http://leahrstone.wixsite.com/libraryliteracyplan.

Hopefully, this blog gives a quick description of what we've been doing at Daniel K. Inouye.  In addition to all of our classes we've also been in the process of moving our old library into our new library.  It's been a lot of work and we've been fortunate enough to have many volunteers to help us (either teachers or parents).  Hopefully we'll be done this week.  We have definitely made progress!