Gotta Keep Reading

Ocoee Middle School Gotta Keep Reading from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.

If I have learned one thing about my class this year, they love music and enjoy singing and dancing. I learned this on the first Poetry Friday. Let me be the first to tell you I can NOT carry a tune, but I still love to sing with the students.  Luckily my teaching partner, Sarah, has a beautiful voice and when we open the wall for Social Studies every day our two classes sing, "It's the most wonderful time of the day as we open the wall and the kids have a ball as we learn (insert content name here) it's the most wonderful time."

With this being said, I began searching for a video that went viral last year, “Gotta Keep Reading.” I decided to use this video to start talking about books.  I printed the words of the song from this link and we started singing and dancing.  Then I had the students underline all the reading vocabulary words in the lyrics. We created a class chart and  had wonderful conversations.  The students begged me to put the video on their iPods and this has been a HUGE project and without Mark, our TST, I NEVER would have been able to it.  There are millions (maybe not a million but many)  steps to convert videos so it will load on an iPod, but he figured it out. Thanks Mark!!

My point being learn to ask for help when you have a new technology tool because you are going to need it.  But more important, once you have someone who has taught you how to do the task then you have to learn the new skill by practicing and sometimes it takes a lot of practice/learning.  It was good for my class to see Mark come in many times to help me learn how to put videos on iPods.  My students saw me get frustrated and then finally be successful. My class is so excited to finally get “Gotta Keep Reading.” on their own iPod.  They took their iPods home this past weekend to share with their families.  More later on how the Wiki/Blog can be an amazing communication tool-stay tune.