#19 of 31 Slice of Life Miss Fickell and the WWE

Thank you to the Two Writing Teachers for hosting the Slice of Life Story Challenge.

Dear friends, I have another story about C.  You'll remember her from the Bull Riding Rap.  She just keeps popping up.  :)

We've been working on some mini-research projects so that we could use the information to learn how to use Educreations.  As is always the case in my classroom, the kids could choose any topic that was of interest to them.  We had the typical fourth grade ideas...basset hounds, Legos, Minecraft, rabbits, rip tides, football players etc.  When I asked C. what her topic was going to be, she wasn't sure.  She thought and thought and thought and then said, "I know! I want to find out how the WWE started."  

Hmmm....that was an interesting idea.  I'm thinking to myself, "What harm could there be in WWE?  After all, my husband's grandmother was a huge fan when she was alive."  I gave her the go ahead and she was able to find the information that she wanted.

Fast forward to today.  Today was the day that we learned how to use Educreations (it's very easy by the way).  The kids had their writing and directions and blank storyboard paper.  The media specialist and the intervention teacher and I were all ready to go.  One thing...the intervention teacher had an assessment day.  Miss Fickell, substitute extraordinaire, would be taking her place.  Miss Fickell is in our building almost every day and subs quite a bit for me.  I let her know ahead of time that we would be working on these mini research projects and she would be in charge of a small group of kids.  It was no problem.

I divided my class into 3 groups and inadvertently put C in my group (so I could supervise her) and Miss Fickell's group.  I called the names for Miss Fickell's group, forgot that C was in my group too, and sent 8 children, including C, upstairs with Miss Fickell.  Eight more students went with the media specialist and 9 stayed down with me.  The room was a quiet hum as the boys and girls worked to divide their stories up, find and save pictures and then create their screencasts.  I was moving around between students, enjoying the productivity of it all.  It couldn't have gone any better.

Fast forward to 45 minutes later.  Miss Fickell walked into my room, her face flushed, holding a school iPad.  I turned to her with a big smile and greeted her.  Blowing a few wisps of hair out of her eyes, she handed me the iPad and said, "What do I do with this?"

This image, which filled the screen on the iPad, was what C wanted for the first slide of her presentation about the WWE.  My eyes immediately zoomed in on the amount of skin showing.  The rest of her slides were not much different.  Each was of a wrestler, half-clothed  and well-oiled.  

Oh boy!  I didn't think half-clothed wrestlers was really appropriate for a fourth grade presentation.  I really don't censor my kids' work, but this one made me a little leery.

"They're all like this," Miss Fickell said to me with desperation in her voice.  "She's pretty adamant that these are the pictures she wants."  (C knows her mind.)

I did a quick image search for WWE and yep, pretty much all of photos were of half naked men and scantily clad women posturing as wrestlers do.

After scanning our choices, we found a few that would fit C's need for images of famous wrestlers and my need for the wrestlers to have all of their clothes on.  

Miss Fickell went back upstairs to give C the news...no half-naked people in the screen cast.  

Miss Fickell definitely earned her sub pay and a bit more today.  That's one of the reasons I love working with her.  She goes with the flow and always comes back!

Here is her presentation using Educreations.