Schools should be a mirror of a future society.   -Anonymous

WINTER 2004:

As we looked at the curriculum and the needs of my first grade class, my student teacher, Christine and I decided to focus on Language Arts for our project.  We had observed the students having difficulty expressing themselves in writing. We had been working on reading informational text and finding facts and details from within the text.  The students seem to love informational text, but some were hesitant to take risks in writing about what they had learned.  This prompted us to build on what they were already doing and add the technology factor to their research and writing tasks.  The computer was introduced as a tool to help the students plan, organize and research topics which they will eventually present as a slide show to the kindergarten class.  The MITTEN project inspired me to extend what usually ended up as a short written report to a learning experience with a wider range of possibilities and depth.

Using the Michigan Standards and Benchmarks as a guide, we decided that we would explore two key elements recognized by the state.  They are:

• Students will begin to develop and use strategies for planning, drafting, revising, and editing a variety of text forms.  Examples include include identifying characteristics of their audience, mapping, and proofreading.
  
• Identify and use resources that are most appropriate and readily available for investigating a particular question or topic.  Examples include knowledgeable people, field trips, library classification systems, encyclopedias, atlases, word processing programs, and electronic media.
  

What we used:

* Kidspiration was used to create our concept webs as well as our KWL charts.

* Yahooligans was used to research each students' topics.

* Appleworks was used to type out five facts for each topic.

* Digital cameras were used to document students' progress and activity.

* PowerPoint was used to create a slide show to present to the Kindergarten class.

FALL 2004:

This term with MITTEN I had a much easier time deciding with my student teacher, Jennifer, which direction we wanted to go with our lessons.   We begin our year in the first grade with a Science unit on caterpillars and butterflies.  We decided to jump right in with MITTEN lessons.  Unlike my last group, this was the beginning of the year and I was not sure what my students knew about computers.  So we began with lessons to familiarize our students with computers and our computer lab.  Once we knew the varied levels we were able to create our lessons geared to the different levels of skill. 

Using the Michigan Standards and Benchmarks as a guide, we decided that we would explore key elements recognized by the state.  They are:

• Students will use classification systems to describe groups of living things.  They will explain characteristics and functions of observable body parts in a variety of animals.
• Students will compare and contrast differences in the life cycles of living things.
• Students will analyze how humans and the environment interact.
• Students will explain how physical and behavorial characteristics of animals help them to survive in their environment.
• Students will recognize similarities and generalize patterns, use patterns to create models and make predictions, describe the nature of patterns and relationships, and construct representations of mathematical relationships.