Week+3

CAST had a lot of great ideas and resources. I looked at few links containing resources and ideas for building background knowledge. In my classroom, I have children from Burma, Thailand, and Mexico. Our town hosts one of the two refugee centers in Idaho, so we tend to get students with many different nationalities. Building background knowledge is always helpful for ELL, but it also benefits the rest of the class, too.

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__**CP Struggles and KA Thoughts**__ I am having difficulties trying to decide how to do my CP and get it worked into my short day. Right now, I am thinking that this is a project that I need to start at the beginnning of the year, in order for it to be done properly AND for it to be less stressful. If we started out with Flat Stanley, thinking about where he could travel in order to find each of the letters that we would be working with - I could implement this project as a Letter Recognition tool to go along with our Open Court Reading Program, and I could also use it for shared writing, geography, etc. This would be a great PBL that would get the students really excited about learning and reviewing their letters/sounds. In addition, I would like to utilize Skype to talk to the people we are sending Flat Stanley to. It would be fun to show a voicethread project of this at the end of the year for Kindergarten graduation. . . Still getting my thoughts together. Because this CP will take an extended amount of time, I will not be able to use it for my Key Assignment. Therefore, I am thinking that I may do a photostory using Voicethread about the activities that we have done in Kindergarten throughout the year and possibly show this at the end of the year - for parents to see.