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Some of the most memorable teaching moments are those that are totally unplanned.... Such is the case of Taco Cat! One of my students came to school with this shirt....  I commented, "I like your palindrome shirt!" to which the kids responded, "What's a palindrome???" Let me tell ya, I love moments like these! I pulled out one of my favorite books (I have many!), Go Hang a Salami, I'm a Lasagna Hog by Jon Agee, for our daily share. Some of the kids could give some examples of a palindrome, by the end, all the kids could. A palindrome is a word or phrase which is the same forwards and backwards. For example, noon is a palindrome. Noon spelled backwards is noon. Race car is a palindrome. And Taco Cat is a palindrome. We even extended palindromes into math groups. Since we were studying addition in Math, for one of my higher math groups, we did some palindromic problems. Here is an example: ~think of a number, for example, 75, ~reverse the number and then add those two numbers 75 +57 132 ~reverse and add again until you get a palindrome 132 +321 363 Yay, we got ourselves a palindrome! It is always fun to go above and beyond!   C is sporting our vocab shirt from our fall collection (first unit on Cells and Living Things.) Domain-specific vocabulary (vocab that is specific to a particular area) is important to teach well. Sometimes it is not the most fun to teach, soooooo... we do vocab shirts! I got the idea from an inservice that we had a couple of years ago. During a unit of study, the kids use washable markers to draw/illustrate the target vocab words on a white shirt. For days before a test, the kids take turns wearing the shirt. They love this AND they remember the words so much better. When we are done, I wash the shirt and we start again. Snap, snap, easy, peesy!  Do you know this book? Of course you do! It's a fantastically positive journey of discovery. The third grade class this year decided to do a large project using this book as a springboard and WOW did it turn out well!  Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss  C is working on his research. First we read the book to the students, Most of them were familiar with it, but it is always a fun one to read! Next up, we all chose a particular country from around the world to research. We then used the tablets and the website, Around the World with Time for Kids to research the country in detail. We looked at key events, population, large cities, etc. We drew timelines, illustrated what the flag looked like, and more! It was a lot of work, but totally worth it! Our lovely tech teacher, Mr. Schneider helped out bunches.  Here is A's suitcase! For our final project we created a "suitcase" to hold all of our activities. My favorite activity was the postcards the students created. On one side of the postcard they wrote a letter to a fictitious friend (the friend's names and address were hysterical in itself!) The letter included a lot of the research info that the students had researched. The students also wrote from the point of view of a sightseer in THAT country. Neat! On the other side of the postcard was a picture from that country. What made this even cooler is that Mr Schneider was able to green screen the kids right into a picture in that country. What?!? The students looked like they were really there!  Here is A's picture. First is her green screen photo, next is her "visit" to her faraway land. Using tech, we were able to superimpose their image on the picture. Cool! The project was spearheaded by our wonderful Mrs. J! Big thanks to her and to Mr. Schneider for their help! We took it a step further and presented all of the things we did to our school board. We wanted to showcase the students and how they were able to incorporate technology into our lessons. The board was impressed and excited by the use of tech by the students.   M is LOLing at a text. Oh the thinks you can think! One of the skills we learn in the beginning of the year is Thinkmarking. I always tell the kids that in Kinder, first and second grades they are learning to read. In third and beyond, they are reading to learn. Digging deeper into a text and being able to pull out information for deeper understanding is a crucial skill. We, as adults, do this automatically, but kids need to be taught this, so that's just what we do. As you read, you respond back to the text, you "talk" to the text as if it were a real person. If something is important, we star it, If something is confusing to us, we ? it, If something amuses us, we LOL it, and so on. Get it? As we go on through the year, it becomes more and more of a habit until they are doing it even with abstract concepts they we are discussing. Thinking about thinking is an awesome thing!   One of the things that I found to be very helpful with Math domain specific vocabulary practice are Word Wallets. It's a little pocket that contains our math vocabulary words, both the new ones (Practice!) and the old ones (Know It!) We keep these in our math folders for practice for homework. Basically we cut down a folder, fold flaps down to make our "wallets" and away we go!  When we start this activity, we have the conversation about how words have meaning and "wealth"; that's why we keep them in our "wallets." Most of the kids seem to understand how and why these are important. At the beginning of each chapter, we cut out the new vocab words from our books and discuss them. In the middle of a chapter and at the end of the chapter we play a review game similar to the game of Headbands using our word wallet words (try saying that three times fast! :)  It's an excellent (and FUN) way to review vocabulary. The kids really "fly" with it!  |
Mrs. Pamela WandersenHello there! Archives
June 2020
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