Whew!  Does it feel like we’re rounding the corner on the 5th week of school?!  We’re still working on procedures and MEAP is around the corner.  Here’s a site worth taking a look at this week:

Looking for a way to grab your students’ attention?  Start your class off with a quotation!  Make that connection right at the beginning — pull the students in, push their thinking, and inspire them with some wise words!  Check out this website: www.iwise.com.  It’s a site that’s full of searchable quotations on a multitude of topics.  No longer do you need to buy those expensive books of quotations — search online for any quote by topic or person.

So, the next time you’re thinking of an anticipatory set — this www.iwise.com — you never know what great quotations you’ll find…you may even find one for the moment you’re behind and frantically running copies off…when it jams…for example:

“Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.” By  Andrew Jackson Young (found at http://www.iwise.com)

www.iwise.com

One of my favorite components of SIOP is Building Background — vocabulary is essential…and not only because we want to save our students from the dismal duty of studying from a book for the GRE and other fine tests later in life.  No, building our students’ vocabularies will help them associate content in their minds more effectively and ultimately increase their academic achievement.

Now, however, onto the real question: how do I build this vocabulary? One great way to build vocabulary is to have students associate a visual with the word.  A second question you ask, then: where do I get these visuals Amy raves on about? Never fear!  You need visuals but may not have enough time to make them yourself?  Of course not, who am I kidding?!  http://www.eslflashcards.com to the rescue!

www.eslflashcards.com

This site is FULL of color printable flashcards that you can use immediately in your classrooms.  You’ll find action, adjective, body part, emotion, sports…oh, I could go on!

I’m going to use these flashcards not only for beginner ELL students to build vocabulary, but also as sorts during particular units of study.  The body parts flash cards will be great in my body systems Science unit!

Welcome back to school!

This is Amy Signing Out!

Need a great quotation to make a connection at the beginning of class?  Need a few inspirational words to get the students thinking and none are on the tip of your tongue?  Not to worry!  This site — www.iwise.com will do the thinking for you!

www.iwise.com

This is a website that allows you to search by person, word, entire texts, or questions.  Try it out!  Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Give your students the first part of the quotation and have them write an ending to it — what a great way to assess understanding!
• Collect quotations from a group of people that you are studying in class and see if your students can identify the author of the quotation — another great assessment tool!
• Use a single quote at the start of each lesson to introduce the lesson.
• Elicit responses as to whether students agree or disagree with a quotation — a lot of justification required.

Check the site out — www.iwise.com!  Imagine all of the language objectives and engagement you could invoke from a simple and easy search in the quotation database.

Enjoy!

This is Amy Signing Out!

What a great SIOP cohort I get to work with!  I just returned home from our September meeting and am reflecting on how nice it was to see everyone again.  Of course, we saw each other a few weeks ago at a large meeting, but that’s not the same as catching up and having a relaxed chance to chat.  Even though we all entered the meeting feeling tired and a bit stressed from the back to school requirements, we quickly returned to our professional learning community — we chatted about things that had gone well, things we hope to try, and things that we’re still thinking about.

Talking about SIOPing a lesson for this week

Doing an Inside-Outside Circle while talking about adaptations

Although you may not be a part of the cohort, I invite you to partake in those conversations with colleagues.  Attack … well, maybe not attack, but approach a colleague at the copier, eat lunch with someone — have a chat about a lesson or think outside the box on how you could try it differently in your class.  Meet back to debrief.   As I sit and reflect on our cohort meeting tonight, I think of this quotation:

“The growth of any craft depends on shared practice and honest dialogue among the people who do it. We grow by private trial and error, to be sure — but our willingness to try, and fail, as individuals is severely limited when we are not supported by a community that encourages such risks.”

– The Courage to Teach; Palmer, 1998, p. 144

Go forth, experiement, and talk about it with a colleague, comment about it here, or send me an email.  Have a great day!

This is Amy signing out!

So, it’s time for MEAP preparation.  I”m always conflicted about this…how to ensure that I’ve reviewed GLCEs from Grade 4, while not focusing too much on MEAP.  What I mean is, how do we ensure that we are combing our way through those cobwebs that have inevitably spun their way through our students’ minds during the summer, while also ensuring that we don’t allow test review to dominate our days.  It’s a tricky one.  And one that is evidenced in the comic below:

This has Grade 5 written all over it — the MEAP in ELA, Math, and Science.  Today my students were exhausted by the end of MEAP preparation!  And so was I.  In the days ahead this week, I’m challenging myself to cover those GLCEs but not make them quite so dry.  Perhaps a game of Garbage Ball is in order?  The class is split into groups and once they answer a question correctly, they get a shot at the garbage (I use a milk crate).  If they get it in, they get to add 2 points to their score…3 pointers optional!  ELL students are provided a safe environment in their group and all group members must agree on the answer before the speaker states the answer to the whole class.  I”ll keep you posted on how it goes!

This is Amy signing out.

Whew!  Day 1 and we made it…not however, without me reverting back to my coffee dependency.  By 6:30 a.m. I was deep into a cup of fresh coffee…oh, the willpower of the summer is gone, long gone!

How age changes everything!

In honor of the first day of school, I share the above cartoon.  Sadly, some students may need encouragment  by family members to get on the bus.  It’s our job, through the use of SIOP and other engaging activities, to inspire our students and create a love of learning that happens much before they are ready to leave home, bound for college.

A colleague shared today after school (after bounding down the hall with an elementary-like gallop), “I remember why I love teaching!”  There had to be a lot of enthusiasm and engagement in his class today.  I extend the challenge to you to maintain such enthusiasm and extend those “first day of school” exciting feelings long into the school year.

If all else fails, head to the staff room and the coffee pot — there’s sure to be another colleague ready to buoy you up and hand you that lovely cup of jo!

Have a great week everyone!

This is Amy signing out.

So, it’s Labor Day weekend and the elusive hope of relaxing over the weekend before school has gone out the window for most of us, I imagine.  But let’s be realistic…deep down, did we really believe that we’d relax?  Did we really picture ourselves in the backyard with friends talking about non-school topics?  For those of you who did, or who are experiencing that right now, well done.  For the rest of us, well, have at it.  Make those first week lesson plans the best ever, given that there’s no hope for that last hurrah of summer.

I was helping a friend find some team building activities for the first week of school and thought that the rest of the world would like them, too.  So here’s a list of ideas to inspire teamwork in the classroom:

Team Building Activities for Teens – Now, this one, I provide with a grain of salt.  Some of the ideas, like building and duplicating a structure are brilliant.  A chance to work in teams, while also giving you a chance to see who works well together — great.  But come on, Back Drawing with teens?  Voluntarily asking teens to touch each other?  I don’t think so!  So be warned…some activities you use at your own risk.

Building a Classroom Community – Includes the proven “give each student paper cut into the shape of a puzzle piece” but with a nice twist that they get a puzzle piece with someone else’s name.  The kids interview the other person to find something out about them and make the puzzle piece.

Excerpts from The Classroom of Choice by Jonathan Erwin – you can read about some great ideas in the google book reader.  I especially love the quote, “It is unreasonable to expect the classroom teacher to single-handedly compensate for society’s shortcomings.  It takes a whole community working together to do that.  What the classroom teacher can do, however, is intentionally create the conditions for students to connect and interact in positive ways, and to teach students the social skills that facilitate the process of connecting and working together.”

Enjoy your weekend!

This is Amy signing out.

So the first day of school is around the corner. You’re frantically trying to set up your room and implement those new ideas that you have for this year. One of those ideas is to post each lesson’s language and content objectives — but just where should they be posted? How can middle and high school teachers find space for objectives when they teach different students (and often different subjects) every hour?

Well, relax…there’s time yet to make your room perfect – perhaps the following ideas will help!

* Post the objectives beside the schedule and written on a whiteboard

Objectives on Whiteboard beside Schedule

* Post objectives in a pocket chart for easy modification and re-use

Objectives in a Pocket Chart

* Create an objectives/assignment board

Objectives and Assignment Board

Other ideas:

* Type objectives ahead of time, print, post in a stack, and rotate them during class change time

* Have the objectives pre-typed in a powerpoint or on overheads to slap up when students arrive after class change time

Content and Language Objectives are most effective when they are:

a) posted for students to see

b) written in student-friendly langauge

c) read to/by the students at the beginning and end of class

What are ways that you’ve addressed objectives at the end of class?  A favorite stand-by of mine is thumbs up/down or drumming on the desk to show understanding.

Find that perfect way to post objectives and let me know what you come up with!

This is Amy Signing Out.