This week we began our preparations to present a clicker book about composting to the foods classes.  As my students were familiar with the clicker book I created for them on composting, we decided to use that as the base for our presentation.  Slide by slide we have been going through and looking at the words and pictures to decide if these are the messages and images they want to share with their peers.  I was pleasantly surprised at how much ownership they wanted to take over the process - right down to resizing the pictures and text boxes!  This means things are taking longer than I thought they would, but we still hope to be able to present by Tuesday.  Stay tuned for pictures and an update on how things went!

In other news, we experimented with making our own homemade apple juice today.  We received our third shipment of apples through the BC School Fruit and Vegetable Nutrition Program and thought to expand our repertoire beyond applesauce.  We had a great discussion about the difference between fresh and store bought apple juice and everyone enjoyed it (despite the fact that it was cloudy and brown - not clear and yellow).  Fresh is best!

For a few months now (since my January 2013 blog post) we have been collecting compost and adding it to our awesome Jora composter.  Now that the weather has warmed up, things are starting to break down and we can look at expanding our collection to include the foods and nutrition department.

In the next two weeks we plan to invite several foods and nutrition classes to our room to view the following Clicker book and sorting activity.  It is our hope that we will be able to educate students so they know what can go into the compost and what cannot.

These are images of the first few pages of the Composting Clicker book.

The following are the first few pages of the Composting sorting activity.

Students can select a "Practice" option or a "Test" option.  In practice mode, incorrect responses cannot be selected; in test mode they can.  On the first page there are two categories to put images in.

Students then click on the title box "In the Compost" or "In the Garbage" and 6 pictures will appear (3 items that can be composted and 3 that cannot).  They then click on the image and it appears in the box below the title.  There are multiple activity pages, all with different pictures. When students are complete, you can print the set to document their level of understanding.

_This book and sorting activity can be found on the SET-BC website under The Learning Centre (curriculumSET) curriculum share.

These were the words one of my reluctant writers asked me a little while after he became used to using clicker 6.  While this student could write and spell fairly well, his penmanship was a bit random and his stories consisted mostly of pictures.  Here is one of his illustrations:

And THIS is what he was able to create using clicker 6 software!  He relied heavily on the use of the word predictor and the only adult support he received was in the proper use of quotation marks for speech and the placement of the occasional punctuation mark.  The storyline is his entirely, as are the illustrations and their placements within the story.

This young author has several other stories on the go that I hope to share

Lately we have been working on learning more about the recycling process.  As a baseline, my students understood that recycling was a school job we did on Wednesdays and Fridays.  We would collect all the bottles, cans and juice boxes we found in the school, sort and then count them.  Twice a month we would take them to the bottle depot and get money for our items.  We would also collect all the paper we found through the school and put it into the yellow bin outside our school.  Beyond that my students didn't know too much about what they were recycling and why.

I created a clicker 6 book called "Recycling" and an accompanying activity called "What I Learned About Recycling".  Both files are too large to load here, but they will be available on the SET-BC website under The Learning Centre (curriculumSET).  However, you are able to see the final product of these two items in the document shown below.  This is the completed document RK created after reading the book "Recycling" and using the clicker set "What I Learned About Recycling." 

We've had a lot of success with using Clicker 6 to help write daily journals.  With the arrival of our SMART board we have started using Clicker to write a morning journal as a class.  About half the class also does an additional independent journal entry each day and one works on his stories every day during free time (stay tuned for his latest and greatest adventure: "Kenny Becomes a Policeman").

Sadly I am unable to post videos to this site without paying for it, so here are a few photos of students coming up to the SMART board for their portion of the morning calendar routine.

This student is completing the phrases "today is . . . yesterday was . . . tomorrow will be . . . "

This student is selecting his name from a pop up and telling the rest of the class how he is feeling today.  Some students ask me to add to their sentence with specific details that pertain to the current day and they enjoy helping by trying to find the correct word from the word predictor.  A few students are even able to come to the computer and type these "add on's" with minimal support.

Below is our completed class journal from today.  The format was altered slightly in saving the Clicker document as a word document for export.  In Clicker all images are presented directly above the word, rather than to the right.  If you are unable to view the embedded document, please try one of the file links below.