Teaching without a teacher

Many times in the classroom, I have a problem. There simply isn't enough teacher to go around. I have a class of 29 students who all need my attention and I find myself having to invent creative ways to instruct all. My school has a reading intervention block where we look at each student's needs and then break them up into small groups where we can teach specifically to their need for 30 minutes a day. I have a small group right now of 6 students where we work together on their reading fluency ( how fast they are able to read). Fifth graders should be able to read about 130 words per minute. This is important because comprehension starts to fail at anything below this. The idea is that too much attention would be spent on decoding the words and not enough attention to meaning.

So I have this small group, my two fellow fifth grade teachers have small groups and we have instructional aides teaching other small groups at this time. However, there just isn't enough teachers for every student so we always need to create an activity for our at-level students. I've tried literature circles, but found I always struggle with finding the time to meet with these lit circles and planning for them since I do have my small reading intervention group. But I think I found something....

We are lucky to have a roaming laptop cart at our school. Thus, I have put me online. Browsing educational sites, like the teacher nerd I am, I ran across an app called ScreenChomp for the iPad. With ScreenChomp, I can record myself presenting a very short lesson. Here is just one of my lessons here (please excuse the messy handwriting. Drawing with your finger is tough. I'll get the hang of it though.):
http://www.screenchomp.com/t/c1bNZMQ8n

Today is the first day that my literature groups will view the lessons. I also got my teammates to help me create a video on point of view, which I'll share later :)



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