Unit Vocabulary: Finding What You Don't Know

Confucius — 'True wisdom is knowing what you don't know'

Something that is hard for me, and probably for most people, is knowing what I don't know. After all, it takes knowledge ans self-awareness to get that far.

I feel that I am slowly moving in the right direction in my career at least, and that comes with experiences, as well as reading, PD, and connecting with other people.

As we were starting our unit in Weather, I wanted to try something different with the unit vocabulary. I not only wanted to assess where they were, but I also wanted to see if there would be any effect on the students if they knew what they did not know.

I started by writing the word "weather" in the middle of the board and having them do the same in their notebooks. I then had them grab their favorite color from the colored pencils I had set on their tables.

I then had the students write all the words they could think of related to weather in their favorite color. When they were all done, I took their ideas and wrote them on the board in my favorite color (or the closest marker).

I then had the students pick a different color they liked, and had them write any new words down.

The last component was for me to add the new unit vocabulary for them. I asked my class to choose a third color for these words.

I did think that my students were using the unit vocabulary much more than they had before, but I cannot say this was the reason. Still, it is something I will try again but will try to emphasize more. Maybe it would be good to do the same thing at the end of the unit and compare the two.

Modeling Technology Procedures For Students

Today I gathered my students around the whiteboard and I prepared the computer to do our grammar exercise. But I soon found that I had not yet scanned in the sheet I wanted to use.

I decided to make mini lesson out of it. 

So as I scanned in the grammar sheet, I walked the students through it and vocalized my thinking. I asked the students questions about what I should do next. I asked them where I should click. Before I knew it, they (or a few of them) were practically walking me through the procedure.

One important part of the lesson was having them look for icons and buttons. Very often I will be with a group of students and half the students will be paralyzed because they don't know what to push or click. I liked having the time to let them scan the monitor for something that might help them.

I was able to do this mini lesson again the following week and I was impressed at how much of the procedure they remembered.

On a side note ...
For the Winter Session of our After School Activities, I am thinking of doing a course inspired by +Vicki Davis about a different iPad and/or PC program each week.

A Trip to the Apple Store - An Opportunity for Flipped Instruction

On Friday I took my class downtown to the Apple Store where they learned how to use iMovie.

This was a great chance for my students to get out of the classroom, and hear a different voice from my own.

We went downtown and walked to the Apple Store. We arrived before they had opened to the public and the staff was waiting at the door to welcome the students as V.I.P.s.

I headed to the back of the store -- expecting to find a room there where the students could go and be out of the limelight of the now gazing customers.

I was wrong.

The staff had roped off a section in the middle of the store for us to use.

I will stop the story here and ask: Have you ever tried to talk to a kid with an iPad in front of him/her? Now imagine kids in the middle of the actual Apple Store and asked to listen.

No, it didn't work.

Not only were they distracted by the gadgets all around, but there were customers and music was playing the whole time as well.

But, then the instructor told them they had 30 minutes to go outside the store and take pictures and videos. The students ran outside and it was all I could do to stay in front of them and prevent them from not going too far.

Once they settled down though, they got really into taking pictures and videos. This was a great advertisement for Apple as well because passers by would comment on how young children were able to independently use the iPads. And, it is Christmas season and the new generation of iPads just came out. (Was this planned?)

When the students went back inside, it was time for them to put their movies together. The instructor explained how to do it, but many of the students could not or did not hear what was said. Despite that, they sat there, on the floor of the Apple Store for about 30 minutes putting everything together.

The students even got to keep their yellow t-shirts and also got a certificate of completion and a USB bracelet.

Flip the Trip

Right now in my COETAIL course we are looking at Flipped Instruction. As I reflected on the experience I thought how great it would be for Apple to flip the field trip.

In my thank you letter to them, I wrote:

I suggest when you have students come in, they watch a preloaded video of how to use the app you are teaching on their iPads. That way the students could rewind the video when they do not understand/hear the instructions.

Thinking about it now, they could make a video they put on YouTube. We watch it at school and start the movies. Then on the field trip, we go to the Apple Store and finish putting them together. Then finally show them there (in the middle of the store).

Students could still go out into the street and take video [or act as an Apple billboard].

Teaching Writing Organization

The writing process is messy. It can be unpredictable and can lead to a path that was previously unseen.

I like that about writing. I want my students to also like that about writing.

Writing is also hard to teach.

The Unknown Path

Four Square
I have my class use an adaption of the Four Square Writing Method when prewriting. I have not been trained in this though. Last year when I started teaching grades 1 and 2 for the first time, I need to revise the way I taught writing, and this was one way I found. I liked it because of its simplicity.

Four Square Writing Method uploaded to Wikipedia.org by Thespian, available 
under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Last year, I thought it worked really well.

This year, I have seen my students have more difficulty organizing their writing. There were students who were disconnecting thoughts. They would start talking about one thing, drift to another, then suddenly go back to the first thing. Then more of them started doing it.

This caught me by surprise, but I thought it could be because:

1) I have been teaching a watered down version where the students simply write four words in the boxes.
2) I teach writing by having the students write in multiple periods rather than try to do everything in 45 minutes. We prewrite on one day, then on the next day when the write it out, I encourage them to add ideas they may have left out.

Looking for Answers
A few years back I took a correspondence course on The Six+1 Traits of Writing. So when I was looking for some answers for organizational writing, I took a look in the lower elementary version.

There are some great activities on organization, but they are more pre-activities, and they don't really deal with organizing a piece of unorganized writing.


What I Did

Day 1

I wrote some sentences similar to what some of them had written in their own writings on the board. I wrote them in a list since I want them to move beyond the list format. Next to it I wrote the same thing in paragraph format in the same sentence order.

We talked about what I had written for a little bit.
What do you see?
Is there anything you would change?

One student remarked that the paragraph on the left was not a paragraph, but a list. That was a good place to start. Some more discussion brought out the idea that the ideas were not put together well.

After discussing what was wrong, it was time to discuss how they would change it.

Day 2 

The next day it was time to break up the writing. I gave them some strips of paper on which to write each of the sentences in their paragraphs.

I remember doing this in high school with research notes. I hated it. But, this was the best idea I had.

I then asked one student if I could use her writing and I put the strips up on a white board. I made sure that they were out of order when I did this.

Then we read the sentences together.

I asked them if there was anything they wanted to change. We then discussed different ways of organizing it. Since the sentences were on strips, and I had put them on the white board with magnets, they were easy to move around.

The students had several different ideas about ways in which they could order the writing. After one student would give what they thought was a good way, I rearranged the sentences and we reread it. Then I asked another student for their idea and rearranged then discussed. We did this a few times.

Talking about writing like this allowed me to talk about beginnings, middles, and endings to writing. We will need to get back to that after Fall Break.

At the end of this session I had them arrange their strips into a way that was different from how they wrote their piece. Here again some students decided to add some more detail to their writings by adding more sentence strips. I had them rearrange three or four times until the end when I told them to put the sentences into an order they liked. I told them beforehand that they might like the way they had their writing originally and if they chose that way it was OK.

They then numbered their strips of paper.

Putting It All Together

On Day 3 they spent time writing newly rearranged writings in their writing notebooks.

How do you teach writing?
How do you teach organization?

Asking Questions and Showing Your Answers

This year I have been trying to place an emphasis on questioning; both for myself and for my students.

When we have Show and Tell time and the speaker asks if there are any questions, there is always someone who says "I like that."

Is this one of my first graders?

So I am getting more practice in with simply asking questions.

For our current unit, our math focus is graphing. This is giving us a lot of practice asking questions when we survey other students.

To start with I am having the students do a one question bar graph. So today they brainstormed what question related to families they wanted to ask. After some students had already gotten up and started their surveys, one student was still sitting at his table.

I asked him what he was doing. He looked at me and he said, "I am thinking."

Think away.

A dragon watches over us.