Big Brother's Note Taking Walkabout

Judy, Jeff, and I had the opportunity to plan a quick unit on government that we are now a couple of lessons into.  Engagement and energy seem to be high.  Next lesson we will find out how well the students are learning the desired outcomes.
Today we set up the flip cam to record what happened after lunch if the teacher didn't show up for a few minutes.  We had had a discussion/debate after the last class about should students have more freedom at school (interesting result: student majority said no).  Combined the classes once Judy and I finally showed up from our extended lunch (actually we were frantically setting up the activity around the school).  Judy led a discussion while I fought with technology and finally showed the students the video.  A variety of things going on, some (not many) even actually started the assignment left on the board.  Students loved seeing themselves on the video, energized them a lot.
They were raring to go on the note taking walkabout.  About 30 different little chunks (thanks for preparing these Judy!) of notes were taped up in the gym, halls, library and students had the scavenger hunt to find them and write them down in the category they believed they fit best (municipal, provincial, federal).  Engagement was high, students were discussing each piece of text they found, all students were on task.  Reluctant writers and/or at risk students got a lot down, it was clear that adding the physical movement with the social small group discussion aspect had the students much more enthused about what was essentially copying down notes.  Judy and I got some good video of the students at work during the activity.  Will be interesting to see tomorrow what understanding and retention the students have of the content.

Engagement vs Learning

An eye opener on this challenging key component of our practice.  To help with learning geography of Canada (which is a review concept) I moved away from worksheet type activities and went for more creative, fun, hopefully learning activities.  We played games with the atlases, movement around the classroom games, we developed mnemonics as a class: individually, in pairs shared them had a lot of fun in learning how to train our memory to help remember things.  We played memory games, cut out all the provinces, capitals, etc used a map to match while playing, flipping over 2 to find a match, repeated saying/chanting "BC's capital is Victoria"  Student engagement was very high, many "this is fun" type comments.  I was feeling pretty smart, until I assessed them today!  Retention of learning certainly was not what I hoped it would be.  Disappointing overall result with a third of the class really not learnng it.  So back to the drawing board.  More of a balance needed with practice type activities and some of the games we learned, or...???  With that many kids not being successful I need to look at what I did and try to find a different, different lens!

Remembrance Letters

Having organized about a dozen Remembrance assemblies I am always trying to come up with something to keep them somewhat fresh and engaging.  This year we completed a class partnered project with my class and Judy's class.  So the kids would be exposed to a partnered teaching experience and work in groups of 4 with a couple of students they hadn't worked with this year.  We met before hand to plan the project together and create balanced groups.  The project involved sharing real letters found online from soldiers to their loved ones from WWII.  I took half of the kids and Judy the other half, we read aloud 3 differnet letters each giving time for 2 of the 4 group members to discuss and record main ideas things that struck them as interesting (the other 2 members of the group were in the other classroom).  When they came back together they had to teach each other about the letters they'd heard, led to some good work in the groups.  Their task was to write a letter together as a group either to a soldier from home or from a soldier to home.  They were given a planning sheet (thanks for putting it together Judy!) that gave them headings to develop ideas under and made sure key elements/criteria were met.  They had to agree on and assign each member of the group a job (discuss each others strengths/share the load, jobs were: recorder, reporter, editor, manager.  They completed group/self evaluations on the provided checklist at the end.  The focus of the letters was to be creative, empathetic, use imagination to think about what wartime would be like for the people involved.  They wrote their lettters  and read them out to the large group.  The letters turned out really well.  Debriefing after the students really enjoyed the project and the opportunity to work with another class.  Judy and I then compiled the letters into just 2 class letters, one from a soldier, one to a soldier.  The results were surprisingly good.  Now we will have auditions for interested students to present these letters at our assembly this week.  Will be interesting to see what the response is to them.

Choice Power

Our class is currently doing a read aloud novel together.  After hearing the chapter(s) each day we do a reading response.  I have taught several different methods for the response.  The main one practiced most is retelling to a partner first then use the first, then, finally frame.  Additions to this have been a 3 panel comic with captions to do the first then finally, and things like diary writing as a character in the story.  Even though the kids are really enjoying the story the reading response is not all that well liked for several and can be difficult for some to complete.  Now that they all know how to do the  different kinds of responding I let them choose in what way they'd like to complete their response and suddenly engagement went up, complaining went down and their work improved.  Me thinks there is something to this choice stuff!