Etherpad vs Google Drive for shared buddy writing?

We have been using Etherpad for buddy writing, using the Recipe for Writing over the past week.  It worked well initially, for the first session, and was particularly good on laptops.  However, the next few sessions were very frustrating for kids using ipads, with the writing refusing to sit in place, and the document kept rolling back to the top persistently.  It was not at all useable on ipads.  So, I have copied and pasted everyone's work on to an A and B doc on roomeight@hunterville.school.nz Google Drive, and our buddy pairs will complete their current narratives in Drive.  Hopefully the visual and collaborative aspect of Etherpad will be maintained, and we will learn to comment using the Drive feature.

This week, I decided we had to do something different and hopefully more motivating for some very reluctant writers.  I worked my way back through the VLN sites I have been reading, and the PD we have had over the past year or two and decided to give Etherpad another go.  I decided to start with narratives, following the Recipe for Writing with Etherpads as per Jill Hammonds and Phyllis Johnson.  
We have only had one session but every pair got stuck in, followed the start up recipe pretty well, and are into writing their setting - what can be seen through a camera lens for the opening scene.   
Our etherpad addresses, if you want to check out our starters, are:  etherpad.mozilla.org/Hunterville8A   and   etherpad.mozilla.org/Hunterville8B 
Thanks for Jill and Phyllis for sharing and helping teachers everywhere!

So, here is their recipe:

Ingredients: Setting the scene, Tuning in the ear, Developing the character, Creating the action, The resolution.

Method:

1. Bring your reader in to a powerful setting of the scene where your story is to unfold.  It helps to imagine that you have a digital camera and have taken a photo of the place where your story is to happen.  Remember you are holding the camera, so you are not in the picture at this stage.  It is a still camera, so while there may be suggested movement, such as "the waves rolled gently to the shore", there is no action in the story at this time.

2. Introduce some sound into the scene to further engage the senses of the reader.

3. Have your character appear dramatically within the setting.  We should get to know something of this character by the way you portray them.

4. Create the action that will bind the reader into the story and continue to develop this to the penultimate moment.

5. Resolve the story with some revisiting of the initial scene, the sounds or the character that was central to the storyline but something has changed - perhaps forever.  Leave your reader with something magic to hold on to.

Stu Duval: Storyteller, Writer, Artist Visits Again!

Last week, Stu Duval visited again, and he is just so motivational and inspiring for us adults and the kids, particularly the boys!  His humour, amazingly quick pastel art and story genre really appeal to us all, but to my boys in particular.  The group from room eight who went to the afternoon workshop really enjoyed it, learned how to plan and build a creative narrative, and were keen to share with the other kids afterwards.  

I have asked each of the kids who went to the workshop to present a mini version of Stu's lesson to a small group of peers, and help them get the ideas recorded so that we can all benefit from Stu's ideas and enthusiasm.  

We have started a creative writing plan, but will build on it, and re visit after the mini workshops on Monday/Tuesday. 

Autobiography: Teacher Example!

The First Fifteen Years - An Autobiography

Let me introduce myself:  Colleen Kennedy, born 2 March, 19 mumble, the youngest girl in a family of eight children!  Four girls and four boys, all born in Raetihi Hospital and christened in the Ohakune Catholic Church on the way home from the hospital at ten days old.  My mum was Grace and my dad was Dooley, his nickname from when he was a wee boy.  We lived on a farm named Otumauma, up Fields Track, by the Whangaehu River.  Our cousins lived on the next door farms, some across a creek and others over the other side of the river, at Irish Corner, in Karioi.

My siblings names are: Nicholas, Kerry, Elizabeth, Catherine, Brian, Josephine and James.  Also living with us were my first cousins, Rosemary and Sue, because their parents had died when they were only young.  They were a bit older than my oldest brother, Nick, who is about 14 years older than me.

My dad told me that I started walking before I was a year old, and talked lots in sentences by the time I was about 15 months old.  I loved books, reading, drawing and writing, but even better, I loved being outside and playing with the big kids, all day, every day.  They all looked after me, but Elizabeth was my special sister, who used to bath and dress and feed me because my mother was so busy.  Mum not only cooked and cleaned and cared for all of us, she also cooked for the shepherds and shearers, and taught the big kids their correspondence school work.  She also sewed all our clothes, knitted all our jerseys and hats, did all the housework she couldn’t get us kids to do, and did all our gardens, except for the vege garden. 

Dad was the vegetable gardener and he had a huge garden!  It covered about a quarter of an acre and was a LOT of work!  We all had to help dig, plant, weed, water and harvest from the huge variety of veges dad grew every season.  He even grew rows and rows of potatoes, that kept us going for most of the year, because he stored them in the pataka, a cool, airy storage shed raised up on piles, hopefully to keep rats and vermin out. 

One day, when I was about four, Dad told me to get a scoop of pellets out of the big drum to feed the chooks.  So I ran up the pataka steps, picked up the scoop, dragged the lid off the red drum and bent over to reach down to the pellets.  I was only little so my feet lifted off the floor and I started to tip into the drum.  Then suddenly, SOMETHING grabbed on to my head and dug its claws in deep!  I screamed and screamed, and dad jumped up the steps in one leap and saw the problem.  

A huge, gingery-black possum had attached itself to my head and wouldn’t let go!  Blood was dripping down my face and back, and dad tried to pull it off, but that just made it dig deeper into my head.  Dad suddenly went very pale and then I saw him pick up a spade and my screams were so loud that mum came running out to see what the terrible noise was all about.  Thankfully, the possum decided he had heard enough, so he sprang off my head, landed on the floor with a thump and scooted out the door, giving mum a terrible fright as he brushed past her leg.  She screamed, but not nearly as loudly as me!

I had to be taken to Ohakune to the doctors to have some stitches put in the holes in my head, and I had bald patches where the doctor shaved my hair so he could see properly!  While I was having the stitches, dad suddenly went a very funny colour, started to sway, and slid down the wall onto the floor.  The doctor stopped sewing, and rushed over to check dad out.  He had fainted, and after the doctor waved some smelly crystals under his nose, dad woke up, and the doctor walked him outside into the fresh air.  The doctor came back and finished stitching me up, but he made dad stay outside.

I thought it was strange, because dad could happily kill and cut up mutton, turkeys, chooks, etc, but he couldn’t cope with seeing his kids’ blood or cuts!    He nearly fainted again a few months later when my brother, James, got his head caught in the door, and it bled and bled.  Dad couldn’t help him, he just rushed outside, shut the door and left mum to cope.  When mum had cleaned up all the blood, and bandaged up the wound, Dad drove James to the doctor, but once the doctor took him in, dad went straight outside again to wait until it was all over!

At last!  Five years old!  I had been waiting sooooo long to go to school with all the other kids.  But no!  Tragedy struck at the last minute.  The night before my fifth birthday, mum came to wash my hair in the bath and she saw …..  spots, all over my back and chest!  I had caught the dreaded chicken pox off the big kids!  Not only would I not be having a birthday party, but I was not allowed to go to school!  Oh no!  I cried and cried until I made myself totally sick and had to have all my pyjamas and bedding changed!  It was a full two weeks before my spots were going and I was allowed to start school. 

 By the time I was five, my big brothers Kerry & Nick and biggest sisters Elizabeth & Catherine were all at boarding schools, Sacred Heart College in Wanganui and St Pats Silverstream for the boys.  Brian, Josephine, James and I were all at Ngamatea School, up Fields Track.  When I finally started school I loved it all!  The teacher was a really kind, happy man called Mr Cornish.  His wife was so lovely and she used to teach us girls to cook and sew. even when I was only five.

When I turned six, I was still at Ngamatea, but a new teacher, Mr Green, had taken over from Mr Cornish.  He was also a lovely, gentle, cheerful man and a great teacher who cared for all twelve of us so well; yes, twelve in the whole school!  The kids in my class were Harvey, Janet, David Donald and myself.  We all played cricket, rugby, soccer and gymnastics up on the field, and we loved making caves around the edge of the playing field.  I really liked all the subjects in school, and only had one big problem, near the end of my last year at Ngamatea when I was about ten years old.

It started during a cricket game up on the field.  One boy, who needs to be nameless, told us girls that we were allowed to field but because we were girls and not very good, we were not allowed to bat or bowl.  Well, that did not seem at all fair to me.  It was just us kids playing, not a competition game, so, us girls all had a little talk and decided that we would not play if we weren’t allowed to have turns at everything.  ‘The Boy’ came down to the cave where us girls were sitting and called me out.  He told me to get the girls back on the field because there were still only twelve kids in the whole school that term, and the boys couldn’t play without us.  I plucked up my courage and said quietly, “Sure, we will come back when we are allowed to take turns at batting and bowling.”  He was very unhappy with me, turned away, and then suddenly came back and punched me right in the nose!

I fell down and my nose was spurting blood everywhere.  I felt really angry and jumped up quickly and said, “That won’t help you get fielders,” and he went to hit me again.  As I fended him off, I accidentally bopped him on the nose!  Then his nose bled too!  He cried and started yelling that he would get his big brother and dad to come and beat me up! 

I was so scared that I ran back to school and hid, because I thought I would be in big trouble and was terrified of being beaten up.  Mr Green finally found me, cleaned me up and took care of me, assuring me I was not in trouble, but I didn’t really believe him. 

When I got home off the bus, I told mum I got hurt by the cricket ball, and went straight to bed.   I refused to go to school and said I was sick for the next week with a bad headache, and then it was the end of the school year and I never went back, because I was so afraid.  That was a sad end to my time at Ngamatea which had been so great until that day.  I didn’t know it then, but things were going to get worse before they got better. 

At the end of that same week, Mum and Dad decided to buy a house in Wanganui and Mum moved there and Dad came down at the weekends and ran the farm during the week.  Us kids had to move with Mum and we lived up on St Johns Hill in Brassey Road.  I had to go to St Marys School down near town and I HATED it!  The kids were awful, they swore and fought and didn’t play any good outside games like cricket or rugby or soccer or netball at play and lunch time.  But the worst thing was the teacher.  She was a Sister in a black dress down to the floor and she was very, very scary!  She yelled, she threw things at the kids who were talking or naughty and she often sent kids out to the corridor and then went out and gave them the strap!  Sometimes six hits, really hard on the hand.  They always cried and had sore hands for about a week. 

I was very, very scared and on day two decided I couldn’t cope with the noise and awfulness any more and decided to go home before playtime.  It was a long way to walk, all the way up St Johns Hill and up to Brassey Road.  I told mum I was sick and cried a lot.  Next day, I walked to school, which took about forty minutes, and then, things were still bad, so I took off again before playtime.  It took me about an hour to walk home, and mum was not happy with me.  I told her I was sick, and cried and cried all day again.  Mum was very annoyed, and when the same thing happened the next day, she ranted and raved and then rang dad.  He drove all the way down from the farm and took me to the doctors, because I told him I was sick and had a sore tummy still. 

The doctor said there was nothing wrong with me, but Dad made me tell him what was making me so unhappy.  I finally stopped blubbering, and told him all about the horrible kids and mean teacher, and he said he would come to school to talk to the teacher.  After that, he asked me to try again at the school and to see if there was one kid I could be friends with and sit by them and play with them. 

I don’t know what he said to the teacher, but from that minute onwards, she was quite nice to me, and some of the girls started to talk to me and I decided I would put up with all the other nonsense and stay at school,  Anyway, if I had gone home again, mum would have given me a good hiding and sent me back to school immediately, or so she told me!

I was very surprised over the next few days, because did make lots of friends, and I even convinced them to play netball and touch and soccer at play and lunch times.  I started to learn so much more maths and English and I really loved social studies and geography, which the teacher seemed to like too.

I was still very scared of her, but I stopped worrying so much about the kids who were naughty and the strapping business, because it was never my friends nor me who were in trouble.  And sometimes the rascal kids probably deserved their punishment.  Sometimes the teacher still threw chalk and dusters at kids but by now I was good at ducking as they flew past.  That was just how things were in those days!

I learned music, too, from a Sister who had an awful medical condition which made her whole body jump around, but she was a beautiful piano player and a clever music teacher.  Sometimes though, she used to hit us, when she thought we hadn’t done enough piano practise or we didn’t quickly do what she asked.  We still had the same Sister teaching our class and she was still pretty tough and fearsome to most of us kids.   But my two years rolled on and my time at St Marys finally ended, with a singing concert.

A new year!  I was twelve and a half, and off to Sacred Heart College and wow, that was really different!  Most of the girls from my class at St Marys were there, along with lots of Sisters in big, long, black habits, and they were pretty grouchy, too! 

And then, I went to my first geography lesson, and guess who was the teacher?  It was the same Sister from St Marys!  She had moved up to the college with me!  I was devastated!  How could she, just when I thought I was free of her!  And, what’s worse, she was teaching my favourite subject, geography!  I almost ran away again, I was so upset.  I thought there was a conspiracy against me!

But there were lots of good things about starting college:  making new friends, learning new subjects like laboratory science, bookkeeping, typing and shorthand, and playing new sports, like softball and tennis, and doing new athletics events like triple jump, javelin, and high jump with a mat!  We had only jumped into a dirt pit at primary school.  The other great thing was the swimming pool!  I used to swim every day, all summer, often twice a day.  We had swimming in class time, I used to go for a swim most lunch times and then after school if there was no tennis practice, we used to swim again. 

I once got into awful trouble because the swimming pool was locked one lunchtime.  I thought they had locked it by mistake, so I climbed over the fence and had my usual swim.  Then our home class teacher caught me sneaking into class with very wet hair, and she went beserk!  She grabbed me by the shoulders of my gym and hooked them over the coat hooks in the cloak bay and went back into class and left me there!  Thank goodness, one of the big seniors came to visit our class, and she helped me get off the hooks.  Unfortunately though, she told all the seniors about me, and they laughed at me every time I walked past.  What was worse though,  I was banned from the pool for a whole week!  In the middle of the hottest summer we had had for years, too!

The hard things about college were the grumpy and mean teachers who wouldn’t listen to explanations or reasons and some lessons which were very boring and seemed to go far too long.

But by the end of the second term, I was really settled and happy at college, and even used to walk back to school after tea at night to study with the boarders from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.  This really helped me learn and study much better and I coped really well with all my subjects.

The only time I was ever really scared during my college years was late one night after study at college, I started to walk home alone, because it was only about three blocks.  I headed along the path, and counted the big plane trees that lined the other side of the road, as I did every night.  But there was an extra ‘tree’ shape, and then it moved, and started to come towards me!  I panicked, raced along the road, and up the driveway of a house where I knew the lady.  I banged on the door just as the man started to run up the driveway behind me! 

I had just started screaming when Mrs Berryman opened her front door and her son rushed out to see what was happening.  The mystery man saw the people in the light, turned and ran back the way he had come, leaving his hat on the ground when it blew off in the wind.  Mrs Berryman rushed to the phone and dialled 111 and I heard her talking about a stalker, and giving the police her address.

 I was still shaking and feeling very frightened.  After I had a cup of tea, a policeman arrived and asked lots of questions about where the man was, and exactly what he looked like.  I told them all I could remember, and by then, dad had arrived to pick me up.  Luckily, dad was in town to go to a meeting at the bank the next morning, because my mum didn’t drive.  I was so thankful to Mrs Berryman for being home and looking after me so well.  Her son had helped to save me too and he was only a small guy, but very brave.

 

After that, I didn’t go to college to study at night any more, but I had learned some good work habits and used to study for two or three hours every night at home, doing homework and studying for exams. 

Epilogue:  Many, many years after I left college, I met up with the Sister who taught me at St Marys and Sacred Heart, and she actually seemed a nice person, with a good sense of humour!  She even spoke as though she had quite liked me!   I would never have believed that as a school kid.  I think back then she must have been pretending to be grumpy and finding it really hard to teach such big classes of kids.  There were over forty of us in her Standard 5 and 6 class at St Marys and many of the kids were noisy, rude to her, and used to fight and swear lots in the playground.  I have also heard that the Sisters did not get very much teacher training time in those days, which would have made teaching 11 and 12 year old kids very difficult.

Reading Reflection

We have been trialling a buddy reading system for the past few weeks in room eight and room six.  We have been buddy reading occasionally with room six over the past year or so, but I thought that peer buddy reading aloud might help our room 8 kids read more, grow to love reading more, develop better expression, and learn more vocabulary with support from a buddy.  
We had some sessions on how to support our buddy, e.g. waiting for word attack, try that again, does that make good sense?, discussing hard/unknown words, discussing reading choices etc. 
Students read aloud for about 8 minutes, then swap for buddy to read.  We need to allow a few more minutes for reading chat each session, e.g. 2 mins making up to about 20!  Ten minutes seemed too long, and five minutes too short.  I think we might move up to ten when all the kids have chosen better novels/texts that they are really interested in.  They are thinking and discussing their text choices much more lately. 
I was really pleased to see and hear every pair in class getting really stuck in and focusing on their reading and listening with very good concentration evident.  
We have a report back session randomly, every second or third day, with buddies sharing the key ideas they heard their buddy reading, then buddy talk about the chosen texts.  
The Room 6 buddy readers are moving on to asking some specific comprehension, evaluation and understanding questions as part of their session, every morning Monday to Thursday at 9am sharp.
This will take their session up to 20 minutes too, matching what is happening in our class.