Veterans Park Academy Media Blog

What made you want to read when you were little? or not?
Maybe it was a really great teacher who sparked your interest, or a parent or sibling who read to you every night, or maybe it was just a great book that captured your attention and got you started… or maybe you didn’t have anyone to help you learn to love reading.

Our middle school Guys Read Club boys want to make sure other boys develop a love of reading, so they have volunteered to become mentors, also known as “reading buddies” to our second grade boys once a week for the next 5 months.

After a training session where the Guys Read members learned how to work with younger students and use several different reading strategies, the boys were matched with 2nd grade boys in six different classrooms. Their job: to mentor, encourage, read to, read with, and listen to the boys read to them.

Every Wednesday morning they show up, share a smile and a book and encourage these younger boys to read and love it. What a pleasure it was today for me to watch them. The 2nd graders were excited about having a “buddy” and the older boys really seemed to enjoy helping them out and giving something back. Hopefully these middle school boys will help instill that lifelong love of reading in these younger boys. We’ll keep you posted.

What or who helped you learn to love reading?

The 5th – 8th grade library has a new look… in the form of 2-ft. tall words wrapped around the upper wall. The words take students through the research process and encourage them to question, wonder, think, read, analyze, create, collaborate, and more…

VPAA students – We have space for one more word on our wall – come take a look at what’s there and then think about what word you would add to the wall if you could? Post it as a comment below…

In addition we have 103 new2 books for students to check out. These books were purchased with A+ money based on student recommendations. There are new biographies of stars like Dwayne Wade, new books on college basketball, new fiction, and new series books, too. This is the first of several shipments – much more to come….

Got that research paper to write or that project to do for Geography class? Where do you begin?

After you choose your questions to answer, you need to choose the right resources to use. Everyone  typically starts with a Google search, but remember that we have access to a lot more scholarly and academic resources and magazines and newspapers than you can find on Google. To get to the databases, simply, go to the VPAA Media Center page from the VPAA homepage. Click on the research and reference link…and then click on Gale Database Portal or the EBSCO Portal.

These databases give you access to thousands of resources that you will NOT find by doing a normal Google search – and they will save you a lot of time. The citations for your “works cited” page are already done for you at the bottom of each article.  Take advantage of these resources and make your paper or project better than ever.

To get the passwords needed to access the databases from home, see Mrs. Wilkes or Mrs. Hanson in Media 1 for a “Home Access to VPAA’s Databases” handout.

The fledgling Girls Read Club has choosen to take on a reading advocacy project. They will become Reading Buddies with K and 1st grade stduents beginning this week. Every Monday and Friday these 17 middle school girls will go to select K and 1st grade classrooms to buddy up with emerging readers and read with them. The girls were trained in strategies to support their new reading buddies and they are excited about the program.  Jordween Casseus, one of the Girls Read club members, says “I think it’s going to be really fun. I’m looking forward to helping the kids read better and introduce them to different genres of books.” The teachers are excited too. It’s always good to have a buddy to help boost the kids’ excitement for reading.

The Sunshine State Reader/Book Battle Lunch Bunch is up and running. We have two groups of students – one 4th grade and one 5th grade – who are meeting each Wednesday during their lunch times to discuuss the 2009-2010 Sunshine State Reader books. Each student has committed to reading at least 8 of the 15 books, taking and passing the AR quizzes, writing and asking each other challenging questions about the books, and preparing for the District Book Battle.

These 36 students are each vying for a position on the coveted 6-person Book Battle team. We are excited to have them reading and working together in such a fun way. Mrs. Johns and Mrs. Forslund are coaching the 4th grade lunch bunch and  Mrs. Hanson is coaching the 5th grade lunch bunch.

Students can view book trailers of all the Sunshine State books on the Lee County Book Battle wiki created by Mrs. Harclerode, the media specialist at Diplomat Elementary school. This wonderful wiki is full of resources for all Lee County students to use.

Are you reading the Sunshine State books? If so, which ones do you like and why?

VPAA students have been busy this past month learning about the solar system, reading a lot of great books, and learning about storybook characters. To show what they’ve learned, third graders have created awesome models of the different planets, 2nd graders made beautiful storybook posters and projects, and 4th graders designed diaramas for books they’ve read. Stop by the library to see these great projects on display.

The VPAA Guys Read Club recieved a $1000 grant from the  Foundation for Lee County Schools last week. The grant, written by Mrs. Hanson, will provide funds to purchase books specifically for the Guys Read Club and geared toward their interests.  As part of the grant, the boys will be creating digital and multimedia projects to promote books and reading at the school. Thanks to the Foundation and all the sponsors for their support of our program!

Something exciting is happening here! VPAA teachers and students are venturing into blogging for the very first time this year, and boy are they excited!Why? Because blogging is a great way to build a learning community beyond the classroom. Learning communities are groups of people who are “actively engaged in learning together”.

What is a blog? A blog is a website where a person (or class) posts articles and other people can comment on those articles. It is different from a web page because a blog invites two-way or multi-way conversation. The word “blog” is an abbreviation for “web log” – a type of journal published on the World Wide Web. Here is a great 3-minute video by CommonCraft called “Blogs in Plain English“.

Why use blogs in school? Blogs provide a public forum where students can share what they are learning, which gives them an authentic audience for their work and invites others to help them learn. Blogging provides motivation to learn more, communicate more effectively, and share what they know and can do.

Using blogging in school helps students to:

• “Own their own learning”
• grow with their peers
• reflect on their thinking
• learn to collaborate
• improve their writing and digital literacy skills
• understand that there are other people in the world who can help them learn even more
• become part of something bigger than their classroom or their progress report
• learn how to use digital tools safely and appropriately
• begin to create a positive digital footprint that they will be proud to share as they get older

Many of these skills and dispositions are included in the AASL Standards for 21st Century Learners as skills we are expected to teach 21st century students.

Who’s Blogging?

Mrs. Tew’s 6th grade science classes have begun blogging about their science experiments at Thoughts From the Lab Bench. After several lessons on “Powerful and Safe Blogging”, the students wrote reflections about an experiment. We then sent a tweet out on Twitter to let our professional learning network of teachers around the world know about the kids’ new blog.

Within a few days the kids had gotten responses from students and teachers all over the United States, and people in Europe and Australia had read their blog. They could tell that because they watched red dots appear on their blog’s ClustrMap. Talk about motivation!

The students have now engaged in conversations with students in Oregon by exchanging comments on each others’ blogs, asking questions, providing new ideas, encouraging each other to continue their  learning – extending their learning well beyond their own classroom. These students are more excited and ready to learn than ever before. Their learning communities are expanding, and along with it, their opportunities to learn – like thousands of other kids across the planet

Several other classes are beginning blogs during 2nd quarter…we’ll keep you posted here so you can see their progress.

Our 4th graders study Florida history. Each year they begin to learn about Florida by creating salt maps and locating and naming important cities and geographical features in and around Florida. This year the maps were outstanding! So, as usual, we put them on display in our libraries for all to see. Here are a few of them. Take a look and tell us what you think.

Thanks to the 4th graders and the 4th grade teachers, Mrs. Johns, Ms. Krystofiak, and Ms. Lach, for sharing your work with everyone!

October is “National Information Literacy Awareness Month“.  So let’s celebrate:

Be curious about the world you live in and…

1. Ask questions
2. Gather information from lots of different sources – books, databases, videos, podcasts, websites, blogs, personal interviews, and more
3. Analyze it
4. Think about it
5. Prove whether it’s true – or not
6. Figure out if  its biased
7. Talk or chat or text with a friend about what you read
8. Organize it
9. Create something (a video, an essay, a song, a story, a podcast, a blog post, a news broadcast, or whatever suits you) to explain what you learned or what you think about what you learned
10. Publish it
11. Solve a problem
12. Make an informed decision
13. Ask more questions
14. Use what you learn to help make the world a better place
15. Explore a new Web 2.0 tool for learning
16. Share it
17. Connect/collaborate with someone in another school, another county, another state, another nation (how could you do that?)
18. Look at your information from a different perspective
19. Have fun with it
20. Do it all over again and again…

And while you’re at it, think about these facts:

• Over 1,000,000 (one million) books are published every year
• Americans have access to over 1,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) web pages and 200+ cable TV networks
• More video was uploaded to YouTube in the past two months than if ABC, NBC,and CBS had aired new content 24/7, 365 days a year since 1948
• The average American teen sends 2,272 text messages a month
• Mobile devices (cell phones, etc) will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet in 2020.

(Source: Did You Know 4.0 video by Scott McLeod, Karl Fisch, Laura Bestler, XPLANE, and The Economist)

In other words, there’s more information being generated today, and at a faster rate, than ever before. Almost anyone can produce websites, write blogs, and make videos, including students.

This means that is is more important than ever for students and adults alike to have the skills to navigate to the right information, critically evaluate it for usefulness, accuracy, and reliability – filtering out bias and inaccuracies, and use it to make informed decisions, solve problems, create new products, generate new ideas, and engage in intelligent discussions – whether face-to-face or online.

Be ready. Be smart. Be information literate