Aziz's KWL

Unfortunately, my student's KWL Chart is not popping up on his blog. Therefore, I am going to post it here on my blog for you all to see. Enjoy! Aziz's KWL

Our Last Meeting...

Aziz and I last met last Wednesday. We worked diligently together so that we could cram all we could into our meeting. I asked Aziz the three unit questions I came up with and he answered each one to the best of his ability. We then took each answer and found clip art to match each answer for Aziz's voice thread. We picked out the clip art together, but Aziz was very creative and put thought into each piece. This is all that we could complete in our last meeting together, but it was enough for me to put together Aziz's voice thread. Aziz informed me that he loves to write stories. He said that he would like to use his blog to post different stories he has written so that others could read them as well. As I have said before, Aziz is truly a bright student. I honestly have never encountered a child that loved to learn as much as Aziz. I am really excited that I could teach Aziz how to use blogging for his benefit! I love being a "teacher!"

Our Second Meeting!

Aziz has been a great student! He is so full of creative ideas and he is very bright. Our second meeting, unfortunately, did not go as planned. On Monday of last week, we were supposed to meet for about thirty minutes so that we could go over our next steps, moving toward our voice thread creation. I arrived at the school to find no one there! In this situation, I had to think like a teacher. I told myself, "OK, there is no school today, therefore, I need to make new plans and extra preparations for my student so that we can get our project done on time." I decided that I would need to create three unit questions that we could use to incorporate into Aziz's voice thread. In our next meeting I planned on letting Aziz answer these questions so that we could show his answers along with clip art in his voice thread. I also wanted to find a credible website that we could find clip art on, but I ended up not finding a good one until our next meeting. Aziz is a good student, and he always did what I asked him to do. He always took initiative and handled our meetings maturely. I am so privileged to have a great student!

My First Student!

I was really fortunate to have such a wonderful student to work with. Aziz is a very intelligent student and he has creative ideas. When Aziz and I first met, we ran into a few technical difficulties. Instead of giving up and rescheduling, we were able to work through those problems and together, we were able to make Aziz's first blog post. On this post we included what his project was about and we posted a KWL Chart as well. I also added a link to improve Aziz's typing skills. He does type well, but I thought that the website I provided would improve his skill. Our first meeting lasted an hour and a half, but it was really productive! In our next meeting I hope to create a voicethread with Aziz and put his creative talents to use!

WEDDING PLANNER CHART

Using spreadsheets allows for creativity, planning, and lots of thinking. It is a great tool for organization and it incorporates your math skills as well. Once you get the feel of spreadsheets, the are efficient and pretty easy to use. In my wedding budget that I created I was able to use formulas to help calculate all my expenses. In the A column I had the estimated cost, in the B column I put the actual cost, and in the C column I put the difference between the A and B columns. I did this by imputting a formula that subtracts column A from column B. I also was able to get the sum of each column by using the same method within the rows of my spreadsheet.


This blog is geared toward 4th to 5th grade students, and as the years pass students are expected to learn more and more at a younger age. My blog may be a bit of a challenge for them, but I think it is a good challenge. I could see myself working with spreadsheets in my future classroom and I believe the students would enjoy it too. You can teach almost any subject and be able to incorporate this tool. I have decided to use my last unit question to be the basis of my inquiry based questions below. My last unit question is "How can I use resources, such as money to help me be successful?" Through these questions students can use graphs in spreadsheets to illustrate their ideas and make charts to explain their findings. Students can get really creative with their graphs because of what spreadsheets offer! This project can be a great learning experience and great fun for students growing up in such a technologically savvy world.

1.) Estimate how much money it take for you to live comfortably in our world today.

2.) How much money does it take to live comfortably in our world today?

3.) Did you go over your budget or under your budget? Why?

These questions can also be linked to the previous two unit questions that I have used. Using those questions I asked the students what occupation they wanted to be to obtain success and what kind of education would they need to obtain that success. We can easily apply that information that we gained to this mini project. I would then ask my students to use the information they obtained about their occupation that they first chose and look up the salary. With this information they can create a budget within this project. They can understand how much things cost and how much they can make in the future.

Cool Tools Used for Making Movies!

I really enjoyed making my movie that is posted below. It was truely an enlightening expierience and a fun one as well. My topic for children throughout this blog has been obtaining success. I have thus far used two of my unit quesitons to help a child find out what that means to him. The unit question I used to create this movie was "How can accademics help me achieve success?" Using this unit question, I was able to show how my education will help me achieve the success I desired. I took pictures with my digital camera and uploaded them into Windows Movie Maker. From there I was able to upload some music into Movie Maker as well from a web site called www.freekidsmusic.com. I was able to start and stop the music anytime I wanted to and with a microphone on my lap top I was able to record my voice within Movie Maker as well. I also made my music fade out when it stopped at the end. Within Movie Maker I created a few titles and credits slides that I could write some open ended questions on and I also used this for my last slide that incorporated my credits. And finally, I added a fade in and fade out transition to all my photos used in the movie. Movie Maker has a lot of fun tools and options to make a great movie educationally and can even liven up a school presentation. I had great fun and I hope you will try it too!