“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
– Benjamin Franklin

Many years ago when I taught 8th grade students U.S. history and reading at Blackhawk Middle School in Bensenville, Illinois, the team of teachers with whom I worked grappled with the home/school communication conundrum. We did not have ready access to email or websites back then, and we did not always have the most compelling “packets” and paper reminders going home.

So we set up a weekly communication for the parents called “Behind the Nothing”. This was a letter which was a letter written by each student each week for their parents to see and learn what the students learned that week.

You see for most of our students, back then, when their parents would ask, “What did you learn today at school?”, the student would almost always reply, “nothing”. So we decided to create a communication from the student voice and from the student perspectives as a new way to inform their parents what they were learning! Well . . . a lot has happened in education, communication, and technology since 1993 when I first started teaching! Of course students were learning then and they are learning now!

In today’s blog post I’m sharing 5 minutes in 5th grade, a five minute podcast with students telling the listener what they learned at a recent outdoor education experience. Today’s teacher is equipped with far more tools for communication than the teacher of 1993. Using the application AudioBoom, I recorded the student’s voices on my iPhone. Click the link below to spend 5 minutes in 5th grade!

Special thank you to Dr. Dave Sherman, Ms. Megan Chin, Ms. Keidan, Ms. Kramer, and Mr. Templer and their awesome South Park School 5th grade students!