I have really great intentions every week of blogging more often, but somehow it always seems that all of the sudden it's Friday and I'm linking up with Doodlebugs for Five for Friday. But today? Today, friends, I'm coming at you on a WEDNESDAY!!
Previously, I blogged about how we use Responsive Classroom structures is in my school. One important aspect of RC is that you take the first 6 weeks of school to establish routines and procedures, and then after your routines, expectations, and procedures are established you can generally move forward throughout the year focusing on instruction. We're in week 4 of the first 6 weeks right now, so we're practicing our routines and structures daily, steadily incorporating more each week, and moving towards small group instruction and independence in 2 more weeks. So far, we're kicking independent reading's tush, and we're dominating Fundations. This week, we launched partner reading, and I'm really surprised with how well it's going. They l-o-v-e it! So much! We've really just been practicing sitting hip to hip, knee to knee, balancing our book, and taking turns as they read each page. If I was better at remembering to photograph my nuggets I would insert a picture of partner reading here. We've also launched writing workshop, using our new writing curriculum.
Another structure that I've started this year is calendar math. It's something that I've never done before. Right now, we've been adding the date on every day and tracking the days we've been in school, but that's it. In October we'll start keeping a tally chart of the weather and using the tally chart to make a graph. Is that all you do during calendar math, or do you do more? (If we're being totally honest I feel like I always hear about calendar math, but that everyone does it a little bit differently.) I'd love to hear about the way you do calendar math.
Have a great Thursday! =)
Rachel
Showing posts with label partner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label partner. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Home Visits & Parent Volunteers
I canNOT believe that there is only one more week of summer break! In DC, teachers go back on August 19th, and our new little loves come to us on August 26th. Literally two weeks from Monday I will be greeting 27 brand new first graders. Yikes! I don't know if it's been how busy my personal life has been this summer, or if the space/time continuum has really started to move forward at a faster pace, but this summer has really flown by. Really, it feels like I just packed up my classroom last week.
Over the past few years, my school has tried out several different parent engagement initiatives. One of the ones that has been pushed the most intensely is the home visit program. (If you're interested you can check out their website here.) We partner with the Flamboyan Foundation to support this initiative, but the basic idea is this: before the school year, or early in the school year, teachers go to visit the homes of all their students to build a relationship with the family. There's obviously more nuances involved than that (you're supposed to take a partner with you; you schedule the visit, and call to confirm, etc.), but that's the basic core. It's a very interesting program, and I feel like sometimes it really pays off and sometimes it doesn't as much. I usually do my home visits with my grade level special ed teacher, since she's in my classroom often and all of my students will interact with her on some level. I will say the one thing I like the most about the program is that it's really nice to already know and recognize kids before the school year starts.
One thing that I'm really working on this year is to have a small base of parents who will volunteer/support our classroom throughout the year. I'm thinking that I'll start them out with preparation tasks, like prepping materials and work stations, maybe organizing the library? But what I'm wondering is: how do you get parents into your classroom? What do you ask them to do?
Over the past few years, my school has tried out several different parent engagement initiatives. One of the ones that has been pushed the most intensely is the home visit program. (If you're interested you can check out their website here.) We partner with the Flamboyan Foundation to support this initiative, but the basic idea is this: before the school year, or early in the school year, teachers go to visit the homes of all their students to build a relationship with the family. There's obviously more nuances involved than that (you're supposed to take a partner with you; you schedule the visit, and call to confirm, etc.), but that's the basic core. It's a very interesting program, and I feel like sometimes it really pays off and sometimes it doesn't as much. I usually do my home visits with my grade level special ed teacher, since she's in my classroom often and all of my students will interact with her on some level. I will say the one thing I like the most about the program is that it's really nice to already know and recognize kids before the school year starts.
One thing that I'm really working on this year is to have a small base of parents who will volunteer/support our classroom throughout the year. I'm thinking that I'll start them out with preparation tasks, like prepping materials and work stations, maybe organizing the library? But what I'm wondering is: how do you get parents into your classroom? What do you ask them to do?
Friday, July 26, 2013
More Math!
Friends! Before I tell you more about this rad type of math that I'm working on I have to tell you what I did today. (pause for dramatic effect) I went running outside today for the first time today since the end of the school year. It's been super nice out for 2 days in a row; normally DC is about 95% humidity in the summertime because the Founding Fathers decided to drain a swamp to build the nation's capital. I felt like it was a sign that I should head outside for a run. When I opened my Nike+ app it totally shamed me. It said "it's been 8 jillion days since your last run". So embarrassing. But then I did a 5K, and I didn't die so I'm going to go ahead and label that a success.
But back to this inverted math. I'm pretty into it. What I want to tell you about today is how crafting a task to use with this model is different from a standard or typical word problem. I think one of the easiest areas to see this difference is in addition and subtraction. So, when you teach a unit on adding and subtracting you're generally spending part of the time teaching students how to solve word problems. A normal word problem might sound something like this: "Mattison has 4 cookies. James has 3 cookies. How many cookies are there altogether?" But when you're using the inverted model, you're going to write a task that is either open-ended, or has multiple answers (sometimes both). Going to the original example, a task for this model on the same content might read something like this: "In all, Mattison and James have 7 cookies. How many cookies could each kid have?" What you really want is a task that has multiple points of entry, and that kids could really spend a significant amount of time working to solve. In this example, you could encourage kids to think about how many different ways they could put 2 numbers together to get 7. It's also likely, in this example, that you would be pushing students to notice how turning numbers around represents a different problem. I find that the easiest way to get started crafting tasks is by working backwards--starting with something more traditional or typical, and then thinking about how I could make it more open-ended or how I could turn it into a problem with multiple solutions. One more piece that's important in this model is that students are generally using a combination of words, numbers, and pictures to show their work/thinking. There's also a heavy emphasis on using labels, but I'll get into that more when I talk about evaluation and sharing.
Another important part of this math model is that students are usually working with a partner, and that they almost always have a variety of tools available to them. Obviously that implies that at the beginning of the year you're teaching your students how to work with a partner and use tools, but that's likely to be something you're teaching at the beginning of the year, regardless of the type of math you plan to use in your classroom. Since you're also usually giving students a materials choice when using this model, you also have to help them figure out what tools are best for different tasks. But I generally feel like these are things that smart teachers are doing at the beginning of the year, anyway, so I'm not going to waste your time talking about all of that here.
I'll be back tomorrow or Sunday (it's supposed to rain on Sunday) to talk about evaluating tasks and how the structure is different when you're teaching at the end, instead of the beginning of the workshop. Happy Friday!
But back to this inverted math. I'm pretty into it. What I want to tell you about today is how crafting a task to use with this model is different from a standard or typical word problem. I think one of the easiest areas to see this difference is in addition and subtraction. So, when you teach a unit on adding and subtracting you're generally spending part of the time teaching students how to solve word problems. A normal word problem might sound something like this: "Mattison has 4 cookies. James has 3 cookies. How many cookies are there altogether?" But when you're using the inverted model, you're going to write a task that is either open-ended, or has multiple answers (sometimes both). Going to the original example, a task for this model on the same content might read something like this: "In all, Mattison and James have 7 cookies. How many cookies could each kid have?" What you really want is a task that has multiple points of entry, and that kids could really spend a significant amount of time working to solve. In this example, you could encourage kids to think about how many different ways they could put 2 numbers together to get 7. It's also likely, in this example, that you would be pushing students to notice how turning numbers around represents a different problem. I find that the easiest way to get started crafting tasks is by working backwards--starting with something more traditional or typical, and then thinking about how I could make it more open-ended or how I could turn it into a problem with multiple solutions. One more piece that's important in this model is that students are generally using a combination of words, numbers, and pictures to show their work/thinking. There's also a heavy emphasis on using labels, but I'll get into that more when I talk about evaluation and sharing.
Another important part of this math model is that students are usually working with a partner, and that they almost always have a variety of tools available to them. Obviously that implies that at the beginning of the year you're teaching your students how to work with a partner and use tools, but that's likely to be something you're teaching at the beginning of the year, regardless of the type of math you plan to use in your classroom. Since you're also usually giving students a materials choice when using this model, you also have to help them figure out what tools are best for different tasks. But I generally feel like these are things that smart teachers are doing at the beginning of the year, anyway, so I'm not going to waste your time talking about all of that here.
I'll be back tomorrow or Sunday (it's supposed to rain on Sunday) to talk about evaluating tasks and how the structure is different when you're teaching at the end, instead of the beginning of the workshop. Happy Friday!
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