If you know me well, you know that my passion is helping students to take responsibility for their own learning. This starts with students setting daily learning goals and monitoring their own progress.
A Title 1 school in New Jersey recently asked me to share ideas with parents of second grade children who are receiving reading interventions. As this was my first Zoom with parents and their children, I didn't know what to expect. Would parents show up? Would they turn on cameras? Would they participate? Well, I'm happy to report the answers were "Yes, Yes, and Yes!!!"
Playing daily word games can really help students discover and utilize the relationships of letter and spelling patterns. I recently ran across a great website
As we wind down this school year, many of our students will need to participate in extended learning during the summer. But who wants to go to summer school? Just the thought of it brings to mind "failure." So, this summer, let’s disrupt what’s been known as summer school and let’s call it summer camp!
Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in my entire education career.
When I began my teaching career in 1991, guided reading was a new practice that was being introduced in schools across the country. The focus of the guided reading groups was to help students develop metacognitive strategies they needed to process a text on their instructional reading level. In these groups, the teacher provided necessary scaffolds. It was up to the teacher to decide the type of scaffold the student might need. For example, a student might not have background knowledge related to the events or topic of the text. The teacher would then provide some background information to support comprehension.
Douglas Elementary School in Tyler, Texas is a great example of professionals who focus on intentional teaching and learning. Under the leadership of Christina Roach, the Pre-K through fifth grade teachers have worked diligently over the past six years to refine their practices of using learning targets and success criteria, along with formative assessments to partner with their students for learning. The staff members are truly experts at intentional teaching.
Are we stressed out? Every time I turn on the news, a new wave of fear and anxiety wash over me. We were forced into a "new normal" in our lives and schools. Many of our children are going through a lot of stressful situations and this impacts on their learning.
This new normal demands that we pay special attention to getting rid of the "bad" stress and creating "good stress" in learning situations.
Games help our learners develop skill proficiency. A good game will challenge thinking and require the player to strategize. Here are a few of my favorite games for children learning phonics AND for older students who haven't developed their encoding and decoding proficiency.
Big Word Meltdown-The goal of this game is to make as many words as you can using only the letters in the big word. Choose a word that contains 9-15 letters. I like to choose science, social studies, or holiday words. Challenge your students to create small words using only the letters from the big word. The person or team who makes the most words wins.
