dextr's Xanga

The First Day of Class

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:53:30 GMT

I've sort of been taking some time off since summer school ended-- can you tell?

But we have to begin thinking about Back to School sometime. I've just read an article by Mary Bar t on how to start class off right. Bart is talking to college teachers, but some of her suggestions are so good for K-12 that I wanted to share them.

In fact, some of her suggestions are way better for elementary school than for college -- who gets to put files on an entrance table, anyway?

Bart recommends having an entrance table right by the door where students can pickup their worksheets or assignments and drop off the papers they're turning in. Give everyone a file, she says, and alphabetize them, and then kids can keep track of notes, returned assignments, etc. A pile of worksheets on the table will be an invitation to pick one up, and turning assignments in and passing them back won't take up class time.

I loved this idea. It's a great way for kindergartners to learn to read their names, and it'll cut down on wasted time in high school classes, too.

If you have a small class and a small number of papers to distribute and collect, a standing file like this one from Susan Winget will do the trick.

A file box provides a more formal alternative.

Another of Bart's ideas that I liked a lot was to put a list of "What We're Doing Today" on the board or projector at the beginning of class. That way, late arrivers can see immediately what they've missed and need to catch up with, and fast finishers can see for themselves what's coming up. I think this can also really help with focus, if you have students who tend to go astray (or if you do).

Bart also recommends posting a focus activity -- something for students to do when they first arrive in the classroom. I think most K-12 teachers know this trick already, but I know that we often skip it on the first day, using team-building or "getting to know you" activities instead. Maybe even making some kind of speech to the troops. Bart suggests putting the "getting to know you" activity on the board. This could certainly reduce the stress of being the first kid in the room, or of arriving in the middle of such an activity on the first day and having to figure out what's going on.

If you're ready to think about the first day of school, grab a copy of Harry Wong's classic The First Days of School. There's a new edition out, so you might want to grab one even if you already have a copy. Read it out on the lanai with your ice cold lemonade (or Mai Tai) and ease your way back into teaching.

Frontier Words

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:48:03 GMT

Jepike777 has asked about Frontier Words. I'm a true believer in Frontier Words for vocabulary study, so I am very happy to talk about them.

The typical method of studying vocabulary is to take a list of words, often words associated with some test or a list of important words such as the Dolch list or the Fry list, and to practice them in a variety of ways, often using flashcards or memorization for quizzes.

Students tend to do pretty badly at this.

Instead, think of the student's vocabulary as a bullseye. The inner white ring is the active vocabulary, the words that student actually uses all the time. Words like "house" and "chair" and "whatever" belong in that ring.

The next white ring is the passive vocabulary. These are words that the student completely understands, but doesn't use. "Emphasis" might be one for an average upper elementary student, or "sullen." It is very personal, though, so it is hard to make a list of likely words. For me, "nomenclature" is a passive vocabulary word. I know the word, and would always get questions about it right on tests, but I don't actually use it.

The outside white space is Outer Space words. These are words that you don't know at all. "Ogee" was one of those words for me until I came across it in a crossword puzzle. I just didn't know what it meant at all, and had never seen it, and didn't know how to pronounce it. I didn't know that word.

There is one white ring remaining: the one just inside the outer black ring. That is the Frontier Words ring. These are words that are familiar. They are not Outer Space words that you've never heard or seen. They aren't in your passive vocabulary, words you really know quite well but don't happen to use. They are words that you sort of know . They are familiar. You may know how to spell them, or how to pronounce them. You have a vague idea of their meanings, but not enough that you could actually use them confidently if you wanted to.

"Ogee" is now a Frontier Word for me. I know that it is a term in architecture, having to do with arches, and I have a sense that it is used about windows. I think it's a shape. I can spell it, and I believe that it is a noun. I couldn't say, "Ah, what a beautiful ogee!" though, with any confidence. I don't remember how to pronounce it, and I wouldn't know for sure which arches are ogees. I'm not even sure that sentence made sense.

Most vocabulary lists that we present to our students have a mixture of all these types of words, a different mix for each kid. Some of us carefully choose lists that we believe will be completely new to all our students -- Outer Space Words for everyone.

This is not a good strategy.

Studying words in our active or passive vocabularies is not useful at all. We already know those words, and we gain nothing by looking them up in the dictionary or copying them over six times or any of the other assignments we so often give.

It certainly is possible to learn Outer Space words. However, we often just move them into our Frontier Words ring -- that's what I did with "ogee." I looked it up in the dictionary, but I haven't thought about it or used it since I met it in the crossword puzzle, so I forgot most of what the dictionary said about it.

However, since it is now a Frontier Word for me, I could pretty easily learn it and get it into my passive vocabulary.

And I could very easily start using the word "nomenclature" if I found myself in a situation in which it was a useful word.

It is easy to move words in one ring on the bullseye from where they currently are. Students can learn ten Frontier Words in the time it takes them to learn one Outer Space word.

So, for efficient vocabulary study, you should have students identify their Frontier Words. Have students underline them when reading, list them on the board when you notice a word in content lessons that most of the class seems to be a little vague about, notice words that are used not-quite-correctly in class discussions.

These are the words to study.

Tiger Lesson Plans

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:41:43 GMT

Tigers are beautiful, dangerous, and readily capture the imagination. Enjoy a study of tigers with an easy room set up and plenty of cross-curricular connections.

Get your room ready with tiger print letters:

Go with orange or black background paper and a suitable motto:
"Our Class is GRRRREAT!"
"We're Tigers for Math!"

Add some leafy plants, real or paper, to simulate a jungle for your tigers.

Read about some literary tigers:

William Blake's "The Tyger" and beautifully read on YouTube.
"Tiger! Tiger!" by Rudyard Kipling
"The Lady and the Tiger" by Frank Stockton
And of course the limerick:
There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger

There are lots and lots of tiger mascots and tiger images for companies, from "Put a Tiger in Your Tank" to "Tony the Tiger." Choose a tiger to research.

Online lesson plans:

Tiger Timeline of Indian History shows how tigers are interwoven into the history of India, while giving kids opportunities to practice skills with chronological thinking.
Crayola's tiger mask art lesson uses Model Magic to make a realistic tiger mask. Use the masks to retell folk tales about tigers.
Lesson plans for "The Lambikin" include tigers, and links to tiger lessons.
A PBS lesson plan on tigers for middle school.
The Washington Post offers a reading comprehension lesson on the Sumatran tiger.
National Geographic's PDF lesson includes tiger fact bingo.
"Taming the Paper Tiger: a Unit on Paper and the Environment" uses the folktale "The Tiger's Whisker" and includes a printable coloring sheet.

Report on Distance Learning

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:16:51 GMT

I'm taking an online class this summer.

We do assignments from the book, turn them in and get a grade as well as a quick note if we have an error, and we have discussions.

There are a couple of really lively, engaged people in the discussions. If I were the instructor, I would consider paying them to take my course every term. Apart from these two, who keep the conversations going, the comments are mostly, "I'm stuck! I'm stressed! I'm confused!"

There are lots of questions I'd ask if it were a face to face course which I don't bring up online. Since I'm comfortable with the topic and have some background, I'm doing fine. It's a lot like learning on your own from a book, except that the grades provide accountability, and you have someone you can ask questions of without feeling like you're pestering them.

The instructor for this class set up the discussion questions better than I did when I taught my first online course last year, and I plan to copy her shamelessly in the fall. However, I am quite sure that I would learn more in a classroom, where there would be more feedback and I could see things being done, in addition to doing the homework. It seems to me that the online class is just the homework, without the class.

That's how I felt about the class I taught online in the spring. It seemed as though the students just didn't make the progress they should have. With current technology, this shouldn't happen. Maybe we're all doing it wrong

Vocabulary Study: Popcorn Words

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:45:25 GMT

Summer is such a great time for reading! Not only reading thrillers in a hammock or on the beach, but also for catching up on reading skills in the classroom. You can really take the time for extensive reading.

And while you're doing that extensive reading, build in some vocabulary study with popcorn words.

Popcorn words are those unfamiliar words that pop up in reading. There they are, forcing themselves on your attention, so it's natural to study them a bit, and easy to add them to your students' vocabulary.

You can give the whole room a popcorn theme while you're doing this. It's an easy and fun theme for a summer classroom.

Here are some fun ways to work with popcorn words:

When an unfamiliar word pops up, write it on a popcorn kernel cutout and pin it on the board. As the class fully learns the new words, move them from their random floating spots on the board to a bowl of popcorn for a visual record of how many new words you've learned!

Give a popcorn box to each student, and let him write "My Popcorn Words" on the cover. Cut sheets of paper to fit, use the popcorn box for a cover, and each student can have her own booklet of words to learn. Depending on grade level, have students add illustrations, dictionary entries, and example sentences for each word.

Give a popcorn sticker every time a student uses one of the popcorn words correctly.
Celebrate the 100th new word (or the end of the unit, whichever comes first) with real popcorn and a movie version of one of the books you've read.

Retrofuture Lesson Plans

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:26:19 GMT

"Retrofuture" refers to earlier ideas about what our current time would be like. Now that we've hit the 21st century, we have lots to choose from -- people making predictions in the 1900s often chose the 21st century to write or draw or make movies about.

Here's a relaxed lesson plan for those finishing out the school year when it's 85 and sunny outside.

Have your students explore the following retrofuture resources:

Make a Venn diagram showing how people from the past thought life would be now, and how it really is. I'd add a third ring and include how life was at the time the predictions were made (often the 1930s through 1950s). You might want to encourage students to consider clothing, gender roles, communications, and travel.

Now you're ready for some great compare and contrast essays!

Technology Lesson Plan: Make a Class Squidoo Lens

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:34:34 GMT

My summer writing class is making a Squidoo lens. Maybe your class would like to do the same.

A Squidoo lens is, in the words of Squidoo, an "organized directory" of resources on a particular topic. We're doing 21st Century Skills, but you can choose any topic at all: the subject of your current unit or classroom theme, the main topic of the class for a grand end-of-year wrap-up, your students' favorite book, or perhaps a small sub-topic that's giving your students some trouble.

Squidoo lenses can include written sections, videos, links, pictures, maps, book reviews, and lots more. Making one is a great way to practice basic and intermediate computer skills (including simple html, use of user interfaces like dashboards, online research, and keyboard skills).

Here's what a Squidoo lens looks like:

Here's how to make one with your class:

Go to Squidoo.com and sign up. You'll need to give an email address. I used my school email address and made the password the title of the class so everyone could remember it and sign in.
Set up a lens (that's what Squidoo calls pages) with enough modules (those are the sub-pages of a lens) for each class member to have one.
Take your students to the computer lab. Help everyone log in. Have each student click "edit" next to a text module, put his or her name into it, and save it. This is the hardest part, but persevere. Everyone can log in at once, but you have to be careful not to have too many hitting the "save" button at the same time. If you skip the name part, you're likely to have students accidentally taking over each other's modules and undoing each other's work, an event which can lead to frustration.
Divide the topic into sub-topics. We're doing 21st Century Skills, so we brainstormed a long list of essential skills for the 21st century, and each student chose one to write about.
Have each student research and write his or her own module, so they can be graded separately. Depending on your class, you might choose to help the students learn to do their own formatting, or to follow them in and fix their formatting yourself.
We're a writing class, so we're putting a lot of work into the prewriting and editing parts of the task. If you're a content course, you'll wan to put lots of effort into research and study of the topic, and let the lens be the final product. If you're a multi-subject class, this can be a long-term project looking at lots of different skills. This can also be a great cooperative project for mulltiple classrooms, whether to integrate many subjects, or to create a grand cumulative project for a department.
Once you have your modules completed, get the class together to organize it and finish it up.
You can then ask for feedback from the Squid Forum before you do your final edit and link it up from your class webpage.

Here's how a lens -- in fact, our lens -- looks while it's in progress.

Please visit our classroom lens and tell us what you think. Thanks!

Thoughts on Distance Learning

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:33:00 GMT

I taught my first online class last semester. I expected it to go well. I work online, I collaborate with people from all over the world online, I accept and grade papers by email all the time -- why shouldn't it work well? I worked hard on my course and was responsive to my students and did my best, and I expected the online class to work just as well as a physical world class.

But it really didn't. I taught a face to face and an online section of the same class at the same time. My online students had a much harder time and just didn't improve their skills the way the face to face class did.

Some said to me, "What did you expect? If they had time to take a class, they would be in the classroom." A group of recent college grads, all overachievers, laughingly assured me that they had never done the online work for their classes. There seemed to be general agreement among the people I talked with that online classes just aren't as good, and everybody knows that, so I should just get used to it.

But I really want to do better in the fall. So I'm taking an online course this term. I figure the experience of being a student in an online class will give me useful insight into distance learning from that point of view.

Essentially, we do the work in our text books, zip up the files, and send them in. There are videos and PowerPoints available, but when I checked the first ones out I found that they were covering the same things that are in the books, so I ignore them. I wouldn't skip classes, even if I decided in the first class that they weren't that useful, so I may be seeing the same behavior in myself that I saw in my online students, in contrast to my face to face class.

We're required to visit the discussion room a lot, and there's actually a lot of chatting going on there, though much of it is "Help! This is hard!" Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't add to the experience for me.

I'm going to write about the experience from time to time during the course, and then next fall as I teach online classes again, and I'd be interested to know what you think, too.

I just read this morning that distance learning is being suggested as a plan in case of a flu pandemic, and of course many schools are using it to cut costs. It's becoming more popular in colleges, and it certainly seems like a good idea.

But only if it's possible to make distance learning a comparable experience to classroom learning.

Lesson Plans for Bilingual Storybooks

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:06:16 GMT

I'm working with Ana Lomba's series of fairytales in English and Spanish, though these books are also available in French -- and you could try these ideas with other bilingual storybooks as well. Spread these ideas out over the length of a week, or the length of the unit.

Listen to the story all the way through in each language. If possible, have a native speaker of each language read the story, or use recordings (Ana Lomba's books have recordings for both languages).

Have students write and illustrate word cards for each of the vocabulary words in the book (if your books don't have a glossary or vocabulary section, you can choose some yourself).

Listen again to the story in the target language if you have one, or in both for bilingual classrooms. Have students pull out the appropriate word card when they hear it said.

Hold up picture cards (with labels, for emergent readers) and give each card to the first student to identify each card. Ask students to stop giving answers once they have cards, so that each card goes to a different student. Let students retell the story, each explaining about his or her word card. So, the student who chooses the card for "Caperucita Roja" can tell how Caperucita Roja was a little girl who wore a caperucita roja -- or how Caperucita Roja vivia con su mama en una casa muy bonita.

Learn the shorter and more essential pages of the story as Jazz Chants. Lines like "Abuelita, abuelita, que dientes mas grandes tienes" are just as good for chanting as "Grandmother, Grandmother, what big teeth you have."

Create matching games with word and picture cards and put them in the Centers area of the classroom.

Once the basic words are very familiar, pick out new groups. Lomba's "Ricitos de Oro y los tres osos" has a nice set of emotion words: asustada, enfadado, llorando, pensativo, and atterorizata. "Caperucita Roja" has a set of adjectives, too, as well as exclamations. Make word cards, play games, or conduct drills -- all your favorite vocabulary activities can come into play here.

Check out my lesson plans on "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Three Bears" to find cross-curricular connections to round out your units.

Teaching Cardinal Directions

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:24:34 GMT

I've often had to give people directions over the phone. However you feel about cell phones otherwise, it is great to have one when you get lost. Often, there comes a point in the conversation at which you can tell how the person came to be lost.

"It sounds like you're on College. Go east on Joyce Boulevard --"
"Should I turn right or left?"
"Well, that depends on which way you're headed right now. Are you going north or south?"

A silence ensues.

"I'm going toward the mall."
"Okay. What town did you start in?"

Finding your way is much easier with cardinal directions.

A compass rose is a great way to start. The one in the picture is at the Botanical Gardens in Fayetteville. You can make one on your classroom floor!

Start with a reproducible to color and label.
Then put down some bulletin board paper on the floor, decide which way is north (use a compass if you don't already know for sure), and follow these excellent directions for constructing a compass rose.

Once you've got your basic shape, you must label the points. If the class understands "clockwise," then here's a nice mnemonic for learning where the directions go: "Never eat slimy worms."

Ron Brown has put together a song for this mnemonic device, to a tune reminiscent of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock'n'Roll."
The BBC seems to think that the phrase is a rhyme, which could give you a couple of minutes of interesting conversation about what "rhyme" means before you delve into their cool online practice.
Have a student volunteer stand on your compass rose and turn in the appropriate directions while the class chants "North, east, south, west. Never eat slimy worms." Give turns to as many kids as it takes for everyone to get it. Then have the entire class turn and point together. A final cheer is optional.

Get some whole-body action to cement the directions in the students' minds. Here are some fun ideas:

A lesson plan for using a compass suggests Simon Says with cardinal directions, and a Treasure Trek.
Get into the habit of using cardinal directions when talking in the classroom. "Line up in the northeast corner," you can say, or "Please take the books to the western book case." You can divide students into groups for activites according to whether their homes are north or south of the school, have them fold their papers along an east-west axis, and line them up facing southwest.

With the cardinal directions firmly in mind, students will find map work much more meaningful. Now they're ready for summer road trips!