Webinar Receipt for Building Schoolwide Excellence in Reading and Writing

Making Fairy Tale Thinking Visible

When I do visible thinking routines in my class, I usually do them as a group to help guide the process and model my own thinking for them. 

This has gone pretty well, but recently I have noticed some students not thinking to their potential. The time had come to push them a little more.

I had planned on doing this as a group, but in an attempt to make it a little different, I gave each student the sheet below.

When I was thinking of this post, I at first reflecting on this lesson, I thought giving the students a worksheet like this was the wrong idea. But now that I reflect on this a little more, I think this was a good step for the students.

In the beginning of the lesson, I went through each question as a class and wrote ideas down on the board so they would be able to copy some words. For whatever reason, hopefully it was because of the holidays, the students were not focusing.

Then I gave them their own sheet and allowed them to work with partners or in groups. I think these routines best serve [young] students when they are able to gain insight by listening to others' ideas. I believe that this "idea sharing" helps push thinking further.

I think the issue here was that the students were overconfident. They thought they knew what to do. They did not need to discuss the story because they knew it.

Maybe I need to sell this better next time.

Or maybe I should do this in the morning instead of the afternoon.

**Follow up note: While working their way thorough this, one of my first graders said, "Hey. I can read this!" Maybe that alone made this lesson worth doing.

Group Reading for Engagement

Living in Japan is great most of the time. However, since we are so far to the right of the map (depending on what map you are looking at) Japan is really far time-wise from many webinars I want to attend. All the IB webinars are Amsterdam time. This translates to midnight Japan time.

On a school night, that can't happen if I am going to keep up with the bouncing students in my room.

I recently watched a webinar in the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Curiousity Series called Using Cliff-Hanging Texts to Ignite Students’ Comprehension. On this day I happened to wake up at 4:00 (how does that happen?) and was able to watch it.

There was one thing that resonated with me about previewing the text. This is something I do often with my lower ESL students; I preview the pictures in the text asking them what is happening, and what they think will happen next. The problem is that doing a picture walk through a story can disengage students in the story preventing them from thinking while reading.

The presenter, May Ellen Voght, walked through a lesson she does with her students, and today I tried it with mine.

I found a version of Jack and the Beanstalk on the BBC and broke it up into chunks, and put each chunk on a slide. We then read each slide together.

At the end of each slide, I asked the students if there were any words they did not know, which I highlighted in blue. I asked them if there were any words on the slide that would help them understand the word, but I did not feed it to them as they were expecting (although some students couldn't resist but to share their knowledge!)

I then asked if there were any interesting words on the slide. I highlighted those in red.

Then I asked if they had a prediction of what would happen next, followed by having them think for about 30 seconds of what the scene might look like.

After reading through the story, we watched the short video that accompanied the story and I asked them if their pictures matched the video. This is something I need to be more clear about next time; I think they thought I meant if their pictures "looked" just like the video rather than what I meant by them thinking of the same general idea.

Finding Patterns Using Circles

Looking for multiplication lessons for my Grade 2's, I came across an interesting way to show multiplication shapes within circles. Since I have a combined class, I thought this could work with both multiplication and skip counting (not saying that multiplication is skip counting though).

I had the following shape ready on the whiteboard when the students came in. 

Many students guessed it was a clock. Then one observant student said it wasn't, and another justified it by saying that clocks don't have 0's on them.

I asked them what they thought the shape they could get by counting by ones and connecting the dots.

They had no idea what I was talking about, so I modeled.

Then they got it. 

We went around the circle together on the white board.

I gave them a sheet with six circles prepared on it and asked them to go through the numbers as I did with the ones. That was a little hard to understand, so I modeled a few lines counting by twos for them.

The second graders were able to continue by themselves, and I worked with the first graders for a little bit allowing the ones with more confidence to leave the smaller group I was working with.

This was one of those lessons where all the students were engaged, working at their own pace, and the task was in everyone's zone of proximal development. 

A few second graders finished early so I gave them this extension problem. 

Tell me what shape you will get if you count by 8's. What is the relationship with the patterns?

Note: I have been writing drafts of blog posts, but never getting back to them. This post was to get me back into reflecting.