October!

October is always super busy! But it really is my favorite time of year. The weather has been great! There's been a few days when the weather was changing or the days of the moon eclipse...when the students seemed crazy! But overall I feel pretty good about school. And of course I get caught up on grading then I get behind again. But you can only do so much!

For literacy I've been doing a lot of Cornell Notes and variations of them. So I struggled to come up with a good October strategy to blog about. I decided to write about one I learned in grad school and used during student teaching. If I write about it now, I figure that will motivate me to try it in the next few weeks. 

It's called Annotating the Textbook. I don't use that name with students because if you say annotating they think it's something intense and don't want to try. For this strategy you take a piece of the textbook, (start with a small chunk) and have the students read it and take notes. But the key is how they are taking notes. As they read they have to jot everything they think. It's crucial that you model this for them or they won't get what they should out of it. Their notes should look like a stream of thoughts and questions. They can even draw quick images if that works for them. It doesn't all have to be scientific! The idea is that you are teaching them what good readers do autmatically. One big thing is making connections and visualizing. 

It's similar to when you ask them to make connections, but you don't use the word make connections. They don't even realize they are doing it. 

To make this strategy more understandable/useable I will post my sample/model and then if I get some good student examples I will post them. 

I think I'll try it with a high interest article then the text.

One more just quick idea I wanted to write about is comics. Every year I want to incorporate making comics into my lesson. I tried again and had somewhat of a failure. I had the students do a  comic project. But I ended up with mostly nice study guides and very little creativity. So it wasn't a complete failure because they still had content...but the comic part flopped. I modified a project I did a few years ago and tried to make it less broad. But, I still think I had too much info at a time. 

I'm not going to give up. My next idea is to try to start by giving them a fill in the blank comic so they get some ideas. Try to work them toward creativity. Then start with a short comic about one small topic. So we'll see how that goes!

 But for today the weather is beautiful and it's a weekend so I'm going to enjoy not being at school! Happy  Saturday!

September Stategy

Oh wow! Time management seems to be kicking my butt!! I am struggling to stay focused and keep on top of grading and lessons. Trying to stay one day ahead for lessons...not awesome! 

I spent yesterday during my plan time, rearranging the desks. I decided my management just isn't good enough right now to be able to let the kids face each other. So it's back to facing forward! We'll see if this new seating chart and trying be a little meaner, gets me back on track!

September's Stategy is a vocab structure. It has an official name, I just can't remember it. I call it 4 box vocab!

Box A the students write the official definition. (Teacher given or from textbook)

Box B is the definition in their own words.

Box C is a pic or symbol

Box D is stating what the word is not.

Some tips...

Model first

Only have students do a small number of words. Pick out very important terms or split them up. I would say 4-8 words.

Really go over Box D...model and give good examples and not so good examps to show what you're looking for.

Okay that's my September post! My goal is to get caught up. Stay farther ahead with lessons and catch up grading! It's never ending. Yay for fall coming! 

August Literacy Strategy

Well I missed July. So I'll give two strategies for August and then pick up from here on out! 

The first one is a classic and fairly straightforward but it is a great note taking tool to teach! I've heard it called Cornell notes and also two column notes. All you do is have the students take notes on a reading where they record the main idea in one column and then 3 details/evidence in the other column. I also add a box at the bottom of the page where the students write a brief summary. I think the key with this strategy is to model what you mean by main idea, details, and summary. Also start with a very easy, high interest article. It's easy to assume that students know how to write a summary. But I've found this is often not the case!

My 2nd strategy is more of a writing strategy and also helps with processing. I may have talked about it before but it's a great tool in the classroom and can be used in multiple ways. It's called powerwrite. All that happens is you give the students a topic or a word and time them for 2 minutes. They have to write about the topic for the entire two minutes. They can write in complete sentences, bullet, or draw pictures. As long as they don't stop. I don't ever grade the powerwrites for accuracy. But after each one I have random students share with each other. And then sometimes I have random students share with the whole class. This helps to keep them accountable!

The new school year has started and I'm excited!! Welcome back!!

Literacy Strategies

In an effort to make myself post more often, I have decided to do one post a month on a literacy strategy that I use in my science classroom. Hopefully, I will post more than just once a month, but at least this forces me to get in a post and if nothing else will remind me to blog! So here is my June Strategy. I'm not sure the name of this strategy but I'm going to call it "Two article viewpoint" activity. In this activity the students work in pairs. They are each assigned an article on the same topic. One article is for an issue and one article is against an issue. Each student takes notes on their article. They then meet up and discuss/compare notes. Then together they write a 3-5 sentences summary of the issue.

This strategy is useful for preparing for a debate, and also to teach about reliability of sources and looking at who wrote the article/crediantials.  I just hand out a two column worksheet with a box at the bottom. Partner A reads first article and fills out the left column. Partner B reads article 2 and fills out the right hand column. Then pairs share and come up with a summary together. 

A simple strategy to help with reading /analyzing articles!

End of Semester Reflection

I know, I know! Once again its been too long in between posts. I am going to really work on doing shorter, more frequent posts/updates. I just re-read my last post and so I wanted to update about some of my goals. In particular my goal to work on incorporating concept maps into my classes.

Ecology End of Unit

Write Up Under Web

Ecology End of Unit

Ecology End of Unit

I have been concept map obsessed this semester! But it seems to be working! I am so impressed with the improvement I've seen. Not only on the students part, but also on my part. I've figured out what words to use and how to structure the directions. My favorite part of concept mapping is that I can really tell if the students understood the concepts or not. The level of thinking is so much higher than just regurgitating information from a textbook or the internet. As you will see from my pictures, it is also a really quick way to check for understanding and pick out big misconceptions or issues with content. For example, I could tell right away that my students were still struggling with heterogeneous mixtures vs. homogenous mixtures. So here's some pics to show you.

 

Enough with the concept maps!  The final project I ended this semester with was a joint project with Biology and Contemporary Literature. We used the Hunger Games as an anticipatory set and did a mini unit on Genetic Engineering, which culminated with a debate.  I feel like I ended on a positive note with high engagement. Time for vacation!   I'll try to update more once I've had my brain break! Happy Summer!!!

Semester Goals and Classroom Updates

Once again I'm behind on posting. I think I have a reasonable excuse since I just had a baby in November. This post will be a catch up!

I was out on maternity leave for the end of the fall semester. I came back in January in time for the start of the spring semester. Here are 5 goals I have:

1. Incorporate mind (concept) maps into all of my classes. 

2. Continue teaching reading and writing across content.

3. Increase the amount/quality of feedback I give students.

4. Deconstruct all worksheets into activities.

5. Go paperless. Continue to transfer all paper pencil graded work to assignments that can be posted electronically. 

I've done some things already to work toward these goals. Here's some things that have been going on in my classroom:

In personal finance to wrap up the intro unit on goals and time management I gave the students a set of words and had them make mind maps. It worked pretty well. I had several different levels of  out comes. One group came up with the idea of using stair steps between all of there words. They had a very elaborate. Thought process of how they organized their words and how they set up their stairs. Very cool!

In biology I've been teaching literature roles and am working up to doing a lit circle discussion from a section in he textbook. We practiced using an article about how a South American male Spider attracts females. The students ended up having a big discussion about spiders mating and were doing the roles without even knowing it. For example they were asking really good higher order thinking questions without me having to prompt them! Exciting!

The last thing that I think is cool is my plan for Valentines Day! I plan on focusing the whole day on chocolate. In chemistry we will do a lesson on the chemistry of chocolate, biology will focus on the environmental issues of chocolate production and how it's grown. And in personal finance we will do a lesson looking at the cost of buying a chocolate bar from the vending machine and how that money could be saved. The social studies teacher is going to do a lesson on chocolate in his economics class.  Always fun to try to get some cross-curricular connections going on! I'll post an update to let you know how it goes. 

Let's hope the next time I update it's warmer and spring is on it's way! I'm ready for this winter to end!

 

Big Post Its Are My Favorite Teaching Tool!

Once again I'm going to share a strategy I used with Big Post It notes. They're just so quick and easy. And the students seem to like using them. This year my district is really focusing on literacy strategies in all content. This is great for me because that's one of the things I love to do. My favorite class in grad school was Reading and Writing across the Curriculum. (Just a quick note: If you have never used the following two books, I strongly recommend getting them and looking through them. They have amazing strategies for incorporating reading into your classroom.
1.)  Daniels, H. , and S. Zemelman. Subjects matter, every teacher's guide to content-area reading. Heinemann Educational Books, 2004. print.

 2.) Tovani, C. . Do I really have to teach reading?, content comprehension, grades 6-12. Stenhouse Pub, 2004. print.

 But getting back to the Big Post Its and the pre-reading activity I did with my biology students...I first learned this strategy in my Grad school class and have done it several times but then I was inspired to try it again after going over it in my Science Curriculum meeting. The way the strategy works is that you pick out key words from a reading (the reading could be a textbook, or article, whatever you choose), in this case I used an article. I picked out about 8 words that I thought were big ideas from the article and then I gave the students the words. In groups of 3 or 4 they had to write the words spread out on a big post it. Then I had them round robin to draw lines connecting words and writing what the connection was between the words. Then at the bottom of the page they made a prediction about what the article would be about. The next step is that they read the article and then re-write their prediction to summarize the article. The following is the citation for the article I used:

I used this activity and article during my ecology unit as a way to talk about food webs and how everything is connected as well as discussing invasive species and how organisms affect each other. The following are some pictures of the Big Post It Activity

This activity worked really well and the students actually wanted to read the article and were interested! Also it was a good way to start thinking about what I want to do next...Mind Mapping! My next unit is cells and I think I am going to try to incorporate mind maps several times. This is something I've wanted to do but I've always struggled to make it work. The activity I did was a good way to have the students do a simple word connection activity which is the basis of a mind map. So maybe teaching mind mapping in small steps will help! Hopefully I'll have some cool pictures to post for my next entry!