Posts

End of Year Culminating Assignments

With SOL, PALS and other tests wrapping up, this often becomes my favorite time of year as I see students imagining, creating, collaborating and exploring in their classes while also reflecting on their growth, learning and relationships.      Some of the great things I’ve seen in the past:  Create a class book. Each student/pair of students creates a chapter reviewing material from the year.  Students create skits, chapter/unit reviews, commercials, movie trailers, news clips. These could be subject matter related or they could be personal reflections (What I learned about myself this year? I’m proud of…Next year, I hope to)  Make use of Zoom to host an expert, go on a virtual field trip, collaborate with another class in virtual school or anywhere in the world. Give the students a FedEx Day (or several shorter FedEx periods). Essentially, a FedEx Day is where you allow the students to take an idea of their own and run with it. For more
Post a Comment
Read more

Quick Writes and Teacher Appreciation

Quick Writes    I find quick writes to be one of the most effective instructional strategies. Not only do they support students becoming more literate, their iterative nature makes learning visible and develops critical thinking. Completed in ten minutes or less, quick writes encourage students to reflect and demonstrate their learning.  Quick Writes are short, informal writing tasks that can be assigned during class or as brief, out-of-class assignments. Quick Writes help students remember, organize, and manage information, and they can be used at any point in a classroom lesson to help them communicate their thoughts, experiences, and reactions to what they are reading and learning. They can also be used as formative assessment to determine how well students have learned conten Here are some examples of Quick Write tasks: admit and exit tickets informal notes/scribbles margin notes while reading list of facts, steps, ideas set of instructions or directions filling in a g
Post a Comment
Read more