There's more than one way to skin a cat

I spend time in our classrooms, I'm continually impressed with the lesson design that engages kids and demonstrates our collaborative spirit.  In the below pictures, you see 2 different teachers who have co-designed a station activity to build understanding and application of pronoun usage.  Notice, however, that despite the same stations, the implementation is unique to each teacher and all of the methods engage students in learning this necessary skill.

Classroom One:  teacher facilitates students to identify pronouns in their current book.

Classroom One:  Students apply their knowledge of pronouns with Post-It notes.

Classroom Two:  With the teacher, students read sections of the book and break down pronouns in each sentence, predicting before getting the answers.

Classroom One:  Students roll the dice to find out which pronouns to use.  One student creates a sentence while the group evaluates it.

Classroom Two:  Each student writes sentences before they each share and evaluate.

Classroom One:  Students divide pronouns and sort them based on their usage.

Classroom Two:  Students sort the pronouns and time themselves to build fluency of skill.

Both Classrooms:  Send an email with online links to practice pronoun use.

Both Classrooms:  Finding alternative resources.

Status of the Class: Examples of Structured Learning Environment

There's a delicate balance between giving students freedom to design their own learning and providing the foundations skills students need to be successful.  In order for that balance to be successful, we must have strong structures in place to support independent learning in relation to learning standards.  See below the examples of how this delicate balance is achieved.

Status of the Class:  In this chart, the teacher is tracking students progress over time, ensuring that they use class time effectively to accomplish the learning objective.

Conferencing:  Using "Status of the Class," this teacher is able to track the students she's conferred with to support their writing.

Visual Supports:  Kids move their clothes pins based on their progress in the writing process.  Students have a visual support for the work to do in the revision process:  No dead words, embed sensory details and dialogue, and ensure NTSSWTSW, No Two Sentences Start With the Same Word for sentence variety.

Poetry as a Mini-Lesson:  Students learn skills such as allusion by enjoying a contemporary poem and identifying the allusions illustrated by the author.  

Poetry Mini-Lesson Part 2:  To further their understanding of the concept, students add to the poem, mimicking the tone and adding their own allusion.

Using the Toolbox:  As students independently write in Writer's Workshop, they use resources to help them structure their writing.

Tracking Student Learning:  As students read independently, the teacher confers with them to determine the application of previously taught content-area skills to their independent reading novel.  This keeps content fresh and relevant beyond the initial instruction.

Point of View:  While reading independently, this student identifies the narrator's point of view, furthering her understanding of current instructional standards.

History as a Plot:  This simple interdisciplinary connection helps students visualize the story of WWI.

5 out of 5 Stars

Over the past week, there have been so many Flyertime successes, engaging kids in getting to know one another, supporting our community by giving to kids in Ferguson, and great book discussions.

Flyertime success is a direct result of the tone we set and the effort we make to connect to kids and model the importance of the class.  Check out these great 5 star reviews (wording courtesy of Miss Marrone's summer reading discussion).

Using resources shared among TMS staff, this picture shows the value of formalizing Flyertime with a daily agenda.

In this book discussion, students discussed the book, rather than just reading the summary sheet.  By having students put down their summary sheet, we emphasize dialogue over "talk at you" presentations.

Setting up the classroom in a circle facilitates better discussion.  Kids make eye contact with one another and provide feedback to one another to continue the conversation.

Clearly, Divergent and Fault in Our Stars were popular reads this summer.  Students added their thoughts as these popular books were discussed.

Crossing the Curriculums

Here's a glimpse into a variety of learning opportunities at TMS this week.  No matter the curriculum area, there are valuable learning experiences happening hourly.

It's DBQ season, a time for students to use graphic organizers like "buckets" to complete intensive writing in social studies.

Math in Art:  Students are using compasses to design their work.  And math doesn't only happen in art; today, in tech ed., 7th graders were determining the formula for circumference to determine how much cable is needed on a bridge's column.

It's always fun to blow up things in science!  There's a chemical process to it....

Making Infographs:  this great software program helps students to organize their research facts in an informative and engaging visual representation.

Notice those highlighters!  Students are using them to identify cause (one color) and effect (another color) in science.

Students get to choose how to practice their geography skills,  puzzle or computer-based program (Sheppard).

Making cookies - to do this, students practice proportions and measuring in FACS.

Reading Conferences:  quick meetings with students help teachers formatively assess student learning and make instructional decisions.

Students work on core strength while rollerskating in PE.  

Very Few Careers Require Employees to Work in Isolation

So, it's a good thing that we excel at collaborative learning!  Check out these great examples of student collaboration at TMS!

Book Clubs started today in this 6th grade class.  Students are having rich discussions about the first chapters of their differentiated books.  Additionally, they choose their roles for the next book club discussion.

 

Students in math are being introduced to Buzz Math, an online resource to gauge student understanding of current concepts.  Based on their ability, students will then be grouped based on their skills.  Teachers will then meet with those small groups of students to support ongoing learning.  Check out that u-shaped table just ready for small group instruction.

        

Students in English conference with one another over their papers.  Each day, they will have a different focus for their feedback.

Students work together in social studies to develop ideas and complete a project.

When They Tell You They've Never Learned It, They're Wrong!

Today, three TMS ELA teachers and I visited two elementary schools to see reading and writing in action.  Our goal was to identify where students are coming from and build a better understanding of how to implement workshop models of literacy at the middle level.

However, probably one noteworthy "ah-ha" we was that 4th and 5th graders have anywhere from 110 - 150 minutes of literacy instruction per day.  Then, students come to 6th grade and have 50 minutes of literacy instruction in ELA classes.  That's a huge difference and the reason we stress literacy across the content areas so thoroughly.

Adding literacy instruction to all classes isn't about helping ELA teachers, it's about helping students sustain and develop literacy over time.  The pictures below come with tips that all content-area teachers can use to provide instruction to students.

In the pictures above, teachers are providing guided reading instruction with students.  In each reading group, the focus is non-fiction skills.  Some groups are reading social studies texts (during social studies instructional time) and some are reading science texts.  Teachers are reviewing text features and comprehension with summary and sequencing strategies. This is something that all content-area teachers could do. When students read in your classroom, pull a small group to provide some direct instruction and build their content-area comprehension.  

Here is one of the strategies teachers used with non-fiction comprehension.

Conferencing with students can come in many forms, sometimes it's one-on-one as the charts above show through documentation of student progress over time.  Sometimes, it's in small groups to enhance a specific skill.  The pictures below shows a student briefly conferencing with a teacher demonstrating their self-monitoring skills. The book being read is an independent choice novel, but the student has to apply their skills to this book.

Setting up the classroom to reinforce reading skills provides students with ongoing tools and reminders for thinking while reading.  What makes these even more powerful is that students help to design this "classroom art."

Holding students accountable for independent reading can be a real challenge.  Elementary uses a couple of tools to reinforce reading at home and school.  Below is a picture of a variety of assessments students can chose from to articulate their understanding of reading.  Additionally, students contribute to questions asked on Edmodo to increase reading accountability.  I've seen us similarly use Socrative to gauge student reading completion and comprehension.

And, below is a little math (just to see if you're paying attention ;)).  What I think is noteworthy about the picture on the left is how students used non-linguistic representation to show their understanding of mean, median and mode.  The picture on the right shows student articulation of their learning.

Writing has been a huge focus in elementary this year.  "Just wait until these kids come to you," one teacher noted as she explained the increased rigor and quality of writing instruction.

See how students are directed to work on writing (above left picture) as the student in the yellow (above right picture) uses an anchor chart to free write how she loves cake.  She's including a thesis statement and reasons for her preference.  While some students independently write, the teacher works with individual students to apply their writing skills.

The two pictures above show students evaluating good writing and deciding what techniques they want to use in their own writing.

And, grammar instruction does happen in elementary school!  When kids act like they don't know the parts of speech or fail to apply the mechanical rules of writing, they are fooling us (or more likely, they've forgotten and need just a little reminder).  In the above right picture, students mastered nouns, verbs and adjectives, but adverbs is intentionally missing as that still requires remediation.

Merging reading and writing really helps students to generalize skills and content.  In the below pictures, students have color-marked their non-fiction text and worked in small groups to identify the main idea of each paragraph. Students are then taking these summaries to make a "Write it strong, write it long" paragraph.

Doesn't the below organizer look familiar?  We do SWBSA (or Then) too...again, it's a way to combine reading and writing.

Elementary teachers use anchor charts to help students remember the routines of the classroom; these charts are designed with the help of students and provide reinforcement of classroom expectations.  You'll notice that the skills of inferring and writing thesis sentences are taught in elementary as well middle school.  In the picture on the far right, notice that students have a clear expectation of their role and the teacher's role when independently reading.  

Finally, when students act like all of this is a foreign (or should I say, modern?) language, remind them of what they learned in 4th and 5th grade; the below pictures show their understanding of plot diagrams, author's purpose, and figurative language such as similes and metaphors.

Knowing that students have exposure to these rigorous concepts in elementary school provides us with fuel to increase our expectations for kids.  By providing mini-lessons to review content, we can more quickly get to the rich learning tools of reading and writing where students have to apply skills in order to develop understanding of any, and all, contents.