Hey hey Carly’s Crew!

This my cat Jafar taking a nap. He inspired my provocation!

It has been a hot minute but we were finally back in the regular classroom today to learn more about educational technology. We debriefed about our experience at in Rebecca’s inquiry based classroom. Next, we learned how to screen record using Screencastify! I chose to wonder about if cats can have dreams and what they dream about. My cat, Jafar, always flinches in his sleep so I am very curious as to if he is dreaming or if it is just natural. It was super easy to create the screen recording of my wonder but I had some struggles downloading it to my computer. I was even able to voice record…just like a vlog! I think this program will be very useful in the future.

Check it out!! Does it make you wonder about what is going on in the cats head? This is something I would use a provocation in a primary classroom if we were doing an inquiry to cats and dreams.

We were asked to create an inquiry that could be used in a K-5 classroom and I think this inquiry about cats and dreaming would be great in a Kindergarten classroom! I would start by showing them this Giphy and asking them the three questions that Rebecca told us to ask:

  1. What do you see?
  2. What do you know?
  3. What do you wonder?

From there, I would be able to create a unit plan. One idea that I had would be to get students to create drawings of what they think the cat is dreaming about. The students would then get to share their various ideas with the class. From there, we would watch videos and read books about cats (or other animals) and dive into their dreams. I don’t think we will find a black and white answer about what animals dream about but this would be a great opportunity to allow students some creative freedom! Students could go home and take videos or pictures of their pets sleeping and create dream bubbles for them. I would encourage my students to share WHY they thought their pet was dreaming of that. I would also ask students what clues did your pet give you that they were dreaming?

Continuing on with the topic of vlogging, we downloaded Audacity and learned about the art of podcasting. Personally, I don’t enjoy listening to recordings of my voice so I don’t think I’ll ever be a famous podcaster! I still tried out recording my voice and making some edits. The program was a little bit hard to navigate at first but once I got the hang of it I was able to create a pretty good recording. It was hard to record high quality audio when I’m in a room with 30 other students that are talking. On top of that, I was only using my laptop microphone so it can’t compare to a high quality snowball microphone. Let’s just say I think I will stick to blogging 😉

See you next week!

Carly 🙂