Webinar Receipt for Building Schoolwide Excellence in Reading and Writing
Posts
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 gr...
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 r...
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 co...