Given the Opportunity...

Wow... It has been quite some time... the world of a first year teacher is BUSY and I LOVE every minute of it...

Today, I want to share with you something I am very proud of and something that my students are extremely proud of! First, I have a question... How often do you let your students explore and show you what they can do? My answer to you would be... "You would be surprised!"

We started this project in September because I thought we would need all the time we could get... however, my students surprised me (why I ever doubted them is beyond me) and we were able to finish them in a little over a week. 

We started by doing a guided drawing of a pumpkin, once they drew and colored their pumpkin (kids love to draw!!) I asked them to pretend they were that pumpkin. I then asked them to decide the life the pumpkin would have... I told them that if I were a pumpkin I would be turned into many pumpkin spice lattes. (insert eye roll here haha) I then let their imaginations flow from there. 

I gave them a four square to organize all of their thoughts and then they wrote a complete paragraph using their four square. After that, they peer edited each others work (which by the way is amazing!!) and then we talked about publishing their work using a computer. We talked about typing and how I was not looking for anything fancy I just wanted them to be able to convert what they had written to a typed form on the computer. 

THEY WERE SO EXCITED! 

I heard many comments and mostly they led back to, "I feel like an author!!" When you as a teacher are excited about something and have such a passion for teaching them something new and the kids are thirsty for what you have, there really isn't any room for failure. 

We did face a few obstacles along the way at no fault of the students. We came across the issue of printing from the laptops and using my flash drive wasn't an option. Also, emailing them to myself was Plan C and that didn't quite workout either! Sure, we could have given up but we persevered through it and finally figured out a solution to our problem. 

What I am about to share with you is very precious and the students and I are both really proud of our finally product. We hope to share more of our published work with you soon!!