IWB & Morning Messages

I thought I would follow up and share my first adventure with my new IWB (Interactive Whiteboard) since I had shared my reflections on the book Literacy Smarts.  This is not my own idea and I owe a big thank you to Katie at Catching Readers for sharing this idea when I wanted to know how she was using an IWB in kindergarten.

Each morning my students arrive and begin their morning routine and move to explore choices.  To help them know about our day ahead I post a morning message on the IWB.  At first, I was handwriting the message and soon we discovered if we needed to erase something it got tricky because we sometimes erased the initial message.  Soon, I discovered we could type it using a text box and then our pen markings could be erased and the text would stay in it's original form.  I love typing the text because I can easily insert additional spaces needed to exaggerate spacing between words.

The students and I have come up with some markings we use daily.  We circle lowercase letters we might be searching for.  We underline uppercase letters we might be searching for to identify the different forms we know for letters.  We decided vertical lines to show spaces was easier to see than a horizontal line between words that looked like we were stringing them together.

As you would do with any morning message I tweak words as I compose the text to increase more things we are searching for.  The opportunities to compare confusing letters have been great discussions in our room; for example comparing t and f.  I keep our searching to a focus for two things.

As Katie suggested she prints her morning message in it's original message and then a copy of the marked up message.  I have been doing this too and then sending it home daily to be placed in a two pocket folder I sent home.  One family sent an email letting me know their kindergarten student was playing school with their younger daughter and the morning message folder.  I love how printing and sending these home makes our learning and work visible.  I want to mention to parents this week during conferences their child should be sharing why we marked the things we did and hopefully school conversations are being fostered.

Printing types I discovered.
1.  Click Print
2.  Click Full Page
3.  I deleted the automatic generated header and just let the date print.