Differentiated Instruction

March 4, 2013March 5, 2013 Sangeeta.McAuley Differentiated Instruction, Diverse Learning Needs, Learning in a Real Life Context, Literacy, Use of Technology

Kings of Writing

Last year, when it was time to sign up for extracurricular activities, I chose to run a junior Boys’ Writing club.

Sometimes I find writing such a challenge for students. They struggle with how to make it “look right” and when I explain that spelling and neatness do not have to be the main foci, they can find it hard to believe. How is it possible that writing can be effective when there are misspelled words or words crossed out on the page?

So, my mission was born. I wanted the Boys’ Writing club to take writing in a different direction and helps students to see that it can be such a powerful tool for communication.

I began with some research. Namely, what were issues at our school that our club could address through writing? How could I use these issues to give writing a purpose?

Here’s what I came up with:

-775 students in our school

-families that are new to Canada

-lunch recess is 55 minutes

-some areas of our playground are closed during winter

-daily problems happen outside that students talk about when they come in after lunch recess

When our club met for the first time, the vision was clear: we could do an advice column to help the students who have problems outside at recess. We made an action plan, the boys committed to attending weekly meetings and I asked them to come up with a name: “Kings of Writing”, they told me.

We discussed how the advice column could work: we would make mailboxes, students from around the school could write letters to the club and we would write responses to these letters. I decided to add one twist. Rather than writing a good copy of these letters, we would record the final responses on an iPad and play these responses over the announcements once a week.

The “Kings” were thrilled. Hearing their responses made them feel like they were doing something worthwhile and I think writing took on a whole other meaning for them.

Here’s a sampling:

kings of writing advice1

kings of writing advice2

kings of writing advice3

This year, I’m doing a version of Kings of Writing that is open to all my students. They collect issues from around the school and we respond to the letters during class time. In some small way, I feel like I’m preparing my class for their generation. Maybe next year, we can do video responses to be played in every classroom!

March 3, 2013March 4, 2013 Roz.Geridis Building Inclusion, Celebrating Success, Classroom Management, Differentiated Instruction, Diverse Learning Needs, Learning About Your Students, Questioning

Wait time

The other day I was reading through Professional Speaking (our OCT magazine). I came across a little piece on wait time and it reminded me of a situation and comment from a colleague last year. I was a model classroom for a combined grade social studies lesson. While I was teaching my lesson, I utilized my wait time with the students throughout my lesson. Upon completion of the lesson, during our debrief session, the Instructional Leader highlighted my wait time. Which developed a fantastic discussion amongst the teachers. Some of the comments were about how long I waited, thought no one was going to answer, how quiet the room was, how proud and surprised many colleagues were about the rich classroom discussion developed due to enough wait time.

Wait time is something which is very important. The first few students who are ready to answer the questions are the students who may not need wait time and are ready to answer most questions. However, by using wait time we allow many students (if not all) an opportunity to process the question and gather information to answer the question. We also know that most students are ready to move on in the lesson and are not left behind still thinking about the question or answer.

A strategy I use to help keep the students focused is I asked the question a second time, the third time I will rephrase the question. Also, sometimes I may need to help activate the prior learning by using some guided questions. Every year I use wait time. Some years I have to wait longer than others but all my students know they need to be engaged and paying attention to the lesson and classroom discussions.

February 16, 2013February 18, 2013 Carmen.Oliveira Celebrating Success, Differentiated Instruction, Learning in a Real Life Context, Literacy, Planning, Resources

Discovering Our Inner Poet

I love teaching writing. Let me be more specific. I loved teaching writing except when it came to poetry. For some reason, I’ve always managed to bring to life the other writing formats and genres with engaging lessons set upon a backdrop of real world contexts. The students, for the most part, ate it all up and asked for more. That is, until I mentioned we would be exploring poetry. The good times would come to a screeching halt as their faces reflected what I had also thought of poetry as an elementary student: boring and challenging to understand (how did I know what so-and-so meant by this-and-that?…and who cares?). So of course, with my determined and stubborn personality, in the past few years I’ve focused on learning how to breathe life into this wonderful writing genre. It hasn’t always been an ocean of roses but, for the most part, the exploration has led us to a whole new level of appreciation and learning.

We have just completed our poetry unit (which will continue informally throughout the year) and I can honestly say that the class thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d like to share with you a few of the activities and resources that made the experience engaging, meaningful, and memorable.

If you haven’t already done so, I strongly encourage you to purchase Classroom Events Through Poetry by Larry Swartz (just purchase any of his books on poetry and drama and you’ll be well on your way to an incredible teaching/learning experience). It’s a practical and concise book that provides easy and meaningful activities to explore poetry in our classroom and our lives. We started by looking at poetry in books, researching it on the internet, and sharing it with each other in daily poetry circles. We created newspaper poems by cutting out words and phrases and ordering them to try and create a themed poem. We took 2-4 sentences from a favourite poem and created a graffiti wall on our classroom door (the students thought this was very cool!). We acted out poetry, sang poetry, and shared the lyrics of our favourite songs after listening to them together. We learned about different structures by having groups of students become “specialists” as they taught the class the structure, gave examples, and had everyone try to create their own.

The culminating task involved creating a poem in the structure of their choice and presenting it at our Poet’s Cocktail Party! This was no ordinary party! Invitations were sent out, the poems were displayed all around the classroom, students dressed up, and food was ordered (grapes, cheese, crackers, cupcakes, and grape juice in place of red wine). As jazz music played, students mingled by reading each others’ poems and discussing their thoughts and opinions. A few students shared their poems and we snapped our fingers in appreciation of their work (yes, we snapped fingers, not clapped because that’s apparently what poets do).

A few students decided that they wanted to enter the Urban Voices poetry contest and their poems have been sent off. How special would it be to have a winner come from our class! Keeping our fingers crossed.

We cut out words and phrases from newspapers and ordered them to create a themed poem.

Students took 2-4 lines from favourite poems and created a graffiti wall on our door.

This poem was presented at our poetry cocktail party.

January 26, 2013January 27, 2013 Tina.Ginglo Assessment, Differentiated Instruction, Diverse Learning Needs, Literacy, Planning, Questioning, Use of Technology

Using Audio for Self-Assessment

I have added a new layer to the writing process in my third-grade writing workshop. As I wrote in a past post, our writing workshop process begins with students writing in their Writer’s Notebooks. When a writer completes a piece of writing, they then meet with their assigned writing partner and/or me for a writing conference. At this conference, writers review the success criteria for their writing assignment and then identify two ways in which they have successfully met the criteria. Writers then identify one criterion that needs to be developed further. They then transfer their writing to their laptop keeping in mind the feedback they received and making their revisions as they type their second draft. Ultimately, writers post their narratives in their writing group on Edmodo.com where they receive more feedback from their group members.

Using Audacity software and a set of headphones with microphone, my third graders have learned how to read and record their personal narratives. Once recorded, students listen back. They then ask themselves two questions: “In what ways does my story sound like a real story?” And “In what ways can I make my story sound more like a real story?” Students enthusiastically record their stories. This component of the writing process engages those auditory learners who could benefit from this new component of the writing process.

I have changed the way I phrase these reflection questions. At first I instructed students to ask themselves, “Does my story sound like a real story? Yes or no?” If yes, why does it sound like a real story? If no, why not?” I found that this self-assessment exercise wasn’t making a significant difference in their writing. I concluded that it wasn’t the process that was ineffective, but the questions I was asking writers to consider. These yes/no questions left writers basically rating their narratives as “good” or “bad.” Their narratives either sounded “real” or didn’t. These questions didn’t allow students to identify the strengths in their narratives and where it could sound better. Realistically, all of my writers’ stories sounded a tad real, some more so than others. The goal here is to make everyone’s writing sound better. Using these new questions should ultimately improve the writers’ craft.

I am also thinking of adding audio to the writing conferences with writing partners and teacher. Some students struggle to give feedback on other students’ writing for a number of reasons. Perhaps a student’s penmanship is difficult to read or spelling or punctuation is interfering with comprehension. Listening to a story as it is intended to sound eliminates those barriers to comprehension.

I am proud of my third graders. Each day they are becoming more independent writers. I believe the secret to their success is that the students understand the flow of our writing workshop and, thanks to clear success criteria, they can identify their strengths as writers. They see themselves as writers! I am fortunate to have access to audio technology. In reality, you don’t need computers or even headphones to make this happen in your classroom. You can go “old school” with a mini cassette recorder. Some old cell phones have recording devices. One of our goals is to teach our writers to write like readers and read like writers. Using audio is one way to get there!