The Stats

Hello! I'm Tessa Dean

Credentials: Early Childhood Education Degree (prek-4) with a 5/6 Endorsement, currently working on my Educational Leadership Master's (administration)

Experience: I've taught kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade for the past 6 years. I am currently a 5th grade literacy and science teacher (weird pair-up, but my admin is pretty laid back and lets us play on our strengths).

Personal: I'm married to a really cute high school basketball coach (ten years!), and we have three children: 2 girls and a boy ages 9,8, and 4.

Besides teaching: I am an aerobics instructor at the Greenwood Athletic Club, a co-captain for the Relay for Life, my daughters' travel-team basketball coach, a supporter of the ARA, an avid runner,  and would like to invite you to church with me (where you can find me happily holding babies in the nursery or teaching 5th/6th grade Sunday School).

The Revamp begins

Summer= class revamp frenzy. As I'm trying to get a head on some of my class technology resources, I've started playing with Google forms in my student's blog (see kidblog.org to get your class' blog set-up today-it's free and very user-friendly).

Here is a link to the survey what my students will complete as their first thread (it is embedded in kidblog so they won't actually have to click a link when they log-in to our class blog):

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18BH66E3V0Of4Df0AXZd9m8EoK6t-iAj2Z6QPJpQc4bw/viewform?usp=send_form

This is a screen shot of the blog- which is locked by passwords and not available for access via internet searches. This provides a safe platform for my students to communicate with me and one another about topics and allows me to easily embed videos and assignments for them. The kids love it- authentic writing and, since they know that their peers will be viewing their posts, they're highly motivated to re-read their comments before posting to check for grammar and spelling errors.

Before introducing the blog, we have a big discussion about how writing is an extension of oneself and that what you say, how you say it, and whether or not you say it according to modern English language conventions are all criteria on which others make evaluations of you as an individual. Fair or not, grammar mistakes cause a loss of credibility with readers.
 To illustrate my point, I show them a few faux letters from parents who have subject-verb agreement issues and other grammatical problems that both distract from the point that the parent is trying to make and portray them as less-than-intelligent.The kids love that even adults struggle with written expression, and can easily see how quick readers are to pass judgements on authors (which further emphasizes that reader-writer relationship thing we're trying to teach...).