One of the best perks of my job is that I am able to collaborate with master teachers from around the globe. My school houses some of the most impressive cast of teachers around and it is an honor each day to learn from them. With that in mind, in the upcoming weeks I am looking to interview a few teachers to both learn and share their craft.
Best practice conferencing, including two conference strategies other consultants won't share with you
Colin's top tips for conferring with individual students
What to do when a student is not engaged in the workshop work time
Leave a comment below and tell me what conferencing tip was most useful for you. Also, let me know if you'd like to hire Colin as a consultant. He is highly skilled as both a mentor and a coach.
Another treasure can be found on the Virtual Cafe Archived Webinars wiki. You’ll meet librarians, media specialists, proponents of gamification in education, and experts in technology integration.
Simple K-12 webinars are popular enough to be noticed by many who nominate and vote for Edublog awards. You can sign up for 500+ free webinars and, if signed up, will be offered much more for an annual fee of $279. Watch the prices. At least once per year, the price drops about $100.
If you sign up to follow the Australia Series Blog, you will have access to weekly, live, free webinars on a range of topics. Most topics relate to technology integration. The downside is that these webinars are not archived – so you need to be available to access them at a time compatible with Australian time zones.
If Australian time zones are difficult, Teacher 2.0 and Classroom 2.0 offer a multitude of webinars accessible to the US time zones (usually 2:00-3:00 Eastern time). Again, these need to be accessed live (with some rare exceptions).
Conference Archives
OK2Ask has archives of video “snack” sessions. All online sessions and materials are provided by Teachers First, an ad-free cornucopia of practical resources for teachers.
Seminar Archives and Lectures
Math Teachers will appreciate NCTM eSeminars Anytime. You’ll find seminars on research intervention, common core implementation, and more.
Vital podcasts, videos, webinars, and resources are delivered by The Open University and part-funded by the Department for Education. On the site, Vital says it “aims to support practitioners in sharing their expertise and thus enhance the quality of teaching and learning.” Search by teaching level and subject to find topics relevant to your professional growth needs.
Connected Online Communities of Practice (COCP) in cooperation with the U. S. Department of Education has contracted with the American Institutes for Research and five other organisations to declare August as Connected Educator Month. Archives of all webinars, sessions, and discussions are available.
Perhaps 2013 is the year you need to recharge or, as Shelly Terrell calls it, reboot. While the current challenge is #26 at the time of this posting, you can look back at previous goals. Can you meet all 30 by 2014?
What do you want to achieve in 2013? What free resources would you recommend? Please tell me in the comment box below.
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It’s time to get out the lesson plan book and plan for December. Below are ideas for math, reading, writing, and social studies.
Ideally, December lessons follow four criteria. They…
fit curriculum standards,
make students smile,
take very little prep time to pull together, and
require very little marking.
You can do holiday activities that address standards such as the Common Core or the Australian National Standards.
So what kinds of activities are holiday-like and fun and academic?
Math
Graphing, Probability, Statistics: Younger students can have fun graphing fun Christmas foods. Older students can use the same items to investigate sample sizes or play with probability.
3D Shapes: Make these ornaments and refer to them during class while naming them, finding surface area, etc.
Problem-Solving: You’ve probably sung The 12 Days of Christmas. One partridge was given on the first day. On the second day, there were 2 turtle doves and a partridge – making a total of 3 gifts. If this pattern continues, how many total gifts would be given on the 12th day? How many total over the full 12 days?
Build the excitement with a picture book based on the song – or the song might be in you iTunes playlist. My favorite version:
Writing
Stories: So what would life be like for the person who received all 12 days of gifts? Discuss. If inspired, write the story. Create a character who gives and one who receives. Put them in a setting. What is the motivation for the gifts? What are the daily consequences?
Poetry: In Ralph Fletcher’s book Poetry Matters, he shares that there was a year he wrote poems as gifts for each member of his family. Poems were written based on interests and hobbies of the person who would receive the poem. Poems can be decorated or framed – something that is good to do the final hours of the final day.
Persuasive Writing: Jen from Runde’s Room suggests students write letters to Santa from the point of view of a literary villain. She posts some examples that students can use as mentor texts.
Vocabulary, Grammar, and Word Study: Students guess the identities of obfuscated Christmas carols. Younger students can go to Visuwords for help. My favorites:
Those in Christian religious schools can delve into all the metaphors used to describe the coming Messiah. What does it mean that Jesus would be the Lion of Judah? Prince of Peace? What about other metaphorical references to Jesus as the Good Shepherd? The Door? Others?
Reading/Writing Connections:
For an ESL reading/writing connection, students can talk through various pages from Peter Spier’s Christmas, a wordless picture book. Pick pages to talk through each day and label items like mistletoe with post-its. Students can later either write out words for the page or they can compare Peter Spier’s Christmas to Christmas in their country of heritage.
The Polar Express website includes an interactive calendar of short writing activities – one activity for each day in December. The North Pole has additional activities.
Analyzing/Inferring: If your library has a good stock of Christmas picture books (or Hanakkuh), bring some back to the classroom. Have pairs of students read a book and come to consensus on the most important line in each book. The pairs write the most important line on a sheet of butcher. Rotate the books so that each pair gets a different story for each of the 3-5 days. Do the ‘most important lines’ agree? if not, can groups come to consensus? Wrap it up by asking students what they believe the author believes is the meaning of Christmas. Do students agree or disagree? Defend. Ruth Morgan has put together books on Hanukkah.
Those who do not have a large stock of Christmas books can listen to stories on Storynory or The North Pole. Again, have students create story mountains, summarize, or find the message behind a story or two.
History/Social Studies/Geography
History: Many students play soccer (football, for my Commonwealth friends) at recess. They might be interested to know that soldiers in WWI played soccer during periods of truce. In fact, both German and English soldiers played on Christmas.
The story is told to music by John McCutcheon. Commonwealth friends may want to preview and decide if the line “He’s singing bloody well, you know!” is appropriate for your age/classroom/school. The lyrics are online, if you care to print and distribute.
Religious Studies: Those of you that work in religious institutions, can label the prophesies on a timeline and compare them to the birth of Jesus. Simple and short, but powerful.
Research/History/Geography: Students pick a country that celebrates Christmas and research the celebrations in that country. Have students look for references to a Santa-like figure, other saints, and references to the Magi (if the Magi bring gifts in that particular country). Students can place references on Google maps using the same process as was described in the post about Haikus on Google maps. The research and presentation could last at least a week.
In an earlier post, I included a video that can be used to introduce students to a Writer’s Notebook. After two weeks of working with a new group of students, students have written more than ten entries and have reflected on their writer’s journals.
Here are some student reflections:
Individual Lessons
Each writing lesson provided students with a different writing idea to try, but no lesson required students to write in a certain way. My “ideas to try” came from a few sources:
It’s easy to get caught up in a cycle I call product-based learning. In a product-based learning classroom, teachers focus student lessons toward the final narrative, the final essay, or the final whatever.
Using only the Lucy Calkins materials, students work on three to six exploratory journal entries before choosing and working on a final piece. The exploratory journal entries include thoughts about important people, places, objects, memorable events, important “firsts”, and more. Ralph Fletcher offers more suggestions – to write lists and wonderings and memories and observations and…
For additional journal entries, consider inspiring students through mini-field trips. In my case, classes walked to the beach in order to make observations along the way, play, and then write observations, memories, and experiences. Students took “mini field trips” around the school. They visited the school fish pond and were introduced to the turtles on the ground floor (most students didn’t know the turtles existed). The science lab hosts a butterfly garden – which many had never seen. The group also walked along a small section of the hiking trails surrounding the school.
Other schools might have students take “trips” to the roof of the school in order to get a different perspective on “ordinary” settings. They might write along the periphery of the playground and write about observations or memories. Ordinary field trips can include intentional writing time at the site or writing during lunch at a park. If possible, arm students with an iPod Touch to take photographs.
When students begin having fun with writing, they are better equipped to be independent writers – working in a workshop community envisioned by Donald Graves. They also begin to know themselves as writers.
Common Core Considerations
It might be easy to dismiss the idea of a writer’s notebook since no particular Common Core Standard specifically states that students “free write” or “develop a collection of writing.”
Yet a writer’s notebook does two things to directly support all of the CCSS writing standards:
Notebooks provide a foundation for more formal pieces of writing. Writer’s notebooks are places where students explore ideas for the formal opinion, narrative, and research pieces they need to write to achieve Common Core Standards. Notebooks lessen the “I-don’t-know-what-to-write-about” time.
Notebooks provide a place where students can practice writing fluency – getting thoughts down on paper in an efficient way.
Writer’s notebooks allow teachers to better personalize the instruction of Common Core Writing Standards. Assuming teachers use a workshop model of instruction, the key is to develop a checklist of standards and address those standards through individual student conferences and small group instruction.
Say, for instance, you have a student like the boy who produced Sample 2 (above). This student is obviously interested in science, especially science having to do with animals and insects. After a month or so of writer’s notebook entries, begins to steer the student toward research and informational writing about an insect of his choice. Later in the year, he might write an opinion piece on the use of pesticides to control that insect. Still later, you might challenge him to write a story using A Bug’s Life as a mentor text. What would a day in life of that particular bug look like?
When you begin the year with a writer’s notebook, you slow down temporarily by putting off the “formal” curriculum – but the notebooks allow you to go faster later.
How do you help students develop writing ideas?
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Many kids are reluctant writers. You’ve seen them…the ones that look up at you with pleading eyes and ask How long does it have to be?
Early this week, two summer school groups entered my room for a course entitled “Strengthening Reading and Writing Skills”. When I asked them to make a human continuum from Please-don’t-make-me-write to Bring-on-the-writing, most put themselves toward the middle or reluctant end of the writing enjoyment spectrum.
Yesterday, I took a put-your-head-down-and-raise-your-hand poll. The prompt: “Raise your hand if you like writing more than when you entered on Monday?” All hands went up. One asked, “Is it okay if I keep writing about this tonight?”
In the spirit of sharing, I made a video that more or less encompasses my first lesson. The goals are twofold:
Move students away from the mental image that writing is something teachers make them do.
Show students how published writers get started in their writing process – where the ideas come from.
In an email conversation with Lisa Yee, she mentioned that she had writer’s notebooks in multiple rooms of the house and in her car. Students loved hearing that – especially the ones that have a hard time getting a single notebook back and forth between home and school.
Students got a kick out of Lisa’s video on how she writes books. Many of them are waiting for a great idea to knock them in the head or float down like fairy dust. It’s nice for them to hear that published authors struggle with ideas too.
How do you help reluctant writers get started?
A question for the video-makers out there: Any feedback on the video? Thoughts or suggestions?
A question for those who know copyrights: In the video, I show pictures of book covers – which are copyrighted material. However, I’m using the pictures to promote the books. Is it illegal to use someone’s work to positively promote them?
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Reblogged from Expat Teacher Man:
