A New 5th Grade ELA Station is Born!

So there is a first year teacher on my campus who reached out to me to see if there was anything we could do to help motivate the students to learn. This particular class is somewhat challenging in terms of behavior but I worked with a few of them last year and technology seemed to help them out and motivate. This teacher along with the other 5th grade ELA teacher and myself all met one Thursday and came up with an idea for stations. While there is no "official" name for this station, I just started calling it the "Tracking your Thoughts" station.

For this station, they put together a Symbaloo page (http://edu.symbaloo.com/mix/5thgradereadingstation1) in which weekly, they will add an article from Time for Kids to it. The teacher has a QR code in which students scan and easily get to the symbaloo. Once they are there, they will click on the given article. We taught the students how to screen shot the articles so that they can get clear text per screen shot. Students then cropped out the excess text and saved the article to the camera roll. A typical article might take 2-3 screen shots. Once they are done with this, students import these screen shots into Explain Everything. Students then lock the image so that they can annotate on it, highlight it and have room to type one it. Students then "track their thoughts" about the article. They will track their thoughts on everything from the text to the images that accompany this article.

Long story short, students were highly engaged with this activity! They cannot wait to roll it into stations. I am really proud of these teachers because it was "just out of their comfort zone" yet wanted to learn about it and implement it!