Note: This year I am blogging weekly reflections at my school site (weskids.com) in order to provide more transparency in my teaching for parents, students, and the community (local and global). I will be cross-posting most of the entries here at Bit By Bit as well. You can see the original posts at the “Reflections by Mr. S” blog.

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2nd Grade students have been busy over the past month! They’ve finished their Internet Safety Poster and learned how to publish them to the web (you can see them HERE). In order to publish, they had to learn the skills of saving, naming the file correctly when saving, taking a screenshot to capture the image (you can see a Tutorial of how to that HERE), how to publish to the Padlet Wall on our website, and also how to delete the screenshot when they were finished.

Students have also been working on Keyboard Climber which helps them to become skilled in finding where the letters are on the keyboard. The correct way to play this game is to use both hands and make sure that any letters that appear on the left hand side of the screen are taken care of by the left hand, and any on the right hand side are typed with the right hand.

Students continue to write poetry and read other students’ published poetry on our “WESKids Poetry Wall“. If you haven’t been there in a while, check it out! You’ll be amazed at how many great poems have been written. There are so many poems, that students needed to learn the all-important keyboard command, COMMAND F for FIND. This skill is essential when students have to sift through a webpage with lots of information on it. For instance, for a student to easily find his/her poem to share with you, he/she would have to use the COMMAND F command in order to quickly sort through all the other poems; otherwise, it would take forever.

An important part of our students’ learning as they go forward in life, is to be able to learn independently in a myriad of situations. One change that has already been happening with our older students, and will continue to increase, is that many learning experiences happen Online. I believe that by the time these 2nd graders get to high school, they will be taking at least one to two classes online, or at least certainly will be by the time they enter college. In preparation, I use some online tutorial sites where the student has to log in, listen carefully to the recorded instructor, understand how to get help from the online tools, and gain confidence in figuring things out independently. I use a site from PearsonSuccess to help accomplish this. 2nd graders are finishing a center where they’ve learned through online instruction on how to use and understand the parts of a website.

Students have continued working with the iPads in order to strengthen their “mental math” addition skills with a game called, Addition Number Top-It.

Lastly, students have been practicing their editing skills with a site where they have to recognize errors in a sentence (mostly spelling) and then correct it. The important thing that I stress with them is that recognizing that a word is spelled wrong is a very powerful skill — even if they don’t know how to spell it correctly (yet). Recognizing that a word is spelled wrong is the first step in solving “the problem.”

Things you can do at home with your students:

• Ask them to show you the lessons described above. They can continue to work on them at home.
• Ask them why I gave them the chance to learn something from an online, recorded tutor rather than from direct instruction from me. Ask them if they liked this type of learning. Ask them if they believe that they’ll be taking courses online in the future.
• Take them to a webpage that has tons of information and ask them to show you the power of COMMAND F!