Transcript

I'm always trying to find new ways to engage my students, to be excited about writing and want to write special messages and label things. And so one of the ways that I've come up with inspiring them to do so is I've uploaded pictures onto my SMART Board of special things that have happened to me, or special visits that we might have had, and then, as a class, we've come together and we've written a special message. So this particular picture is of my girls and they came after school one day and visited the classroom, and then the next day I surprised my class with a picture of them waving to say hi. And since I talk a lot about my children in my writing, it was really neat for the students to see them. They helped me label the picture with names, so, my daughter Hannah, we wrote the name Hannah, and my daughter Emma, and then we wrote my name on top, and we also labelled different things in the classroom.

Another way I would use this picture is I could write at the bottom a special message, "Hannah and Emma say hi to you", or, "they came to visit and really loved your drama center". And that would really get the kids engaged, not just showing that I can draw pictures, but also that I can take them and label things in those. So, one of the ways that we can label is we can take our SMART pens, from the SMART Board, and all we need to do is, with our SMART Board tools, make sure that our pen is on, and then we can write right on our picture, and label the picture. So I can write Hannah's name on top of Hannah to show that good authors would label things in pictures. Or we can just take our fingers and write with our fingers a special message. And so if I wanted to label my daughter Emma, I could just write her name using my finger.