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It has been a whirlwind week and what a better way to reflect than Thoughts for Thursday. This week, I have been writing integrated literacy lessons for my district, which is one of my favorite things to do! It's very nerdy, but I love writing lesson plans - I love providing assistance to teachers who need more confidence in the classroom or to teacher who just want more - I love it.
We were writing in a new lesson template, UBD - Universal by Design, which in layman's terms, is backwards design. By outlining transfer goals (what do you want them to do at 40 years old), understandings, knowledge (what do you want them to know), and skills (what do you want them to do) - you can better prepare for misconceptions or challenges your students may have. It also makes you plan the assessment first, which is just good teaching practice, but most people forget that essential step. If you know what the assessment will look like, you can better prepare your lessons, because you know the expectation. Planning your assessment first is for your benefit! If you don't have a clear picture or a clear set of expectations for your students to meet at the end, then your lessons will be poorly planned and executed.
Okay - that's my soapbox for the day. (:
This week, aside from being extremely busy in my professional life, I have had some not-so-busy moments in my personal life. It's been a slow summer for me - I haven't done a whole lot, I haven't hung out with a lot of people and it hit me this week. I've just been feeling very lonely and unfulfilled and while it's no one's job, but my own to make sure I am happy and fulfilled - we all have these moments. We all have moments where we wish our friends lived closer and reached out more. We all have moments where we wish we had all the money to travel all over. We all have those moments. I had mine this week.
Yes, I'm a positive Patty, but this week, I struggled to maintain it, but I am thankful for an amazing friend who reached out to me and got me to go to an amazing church service, where my heart was filled with Jesus and friend love.
Little moments like that remind me to not be so hard on myself and the others around me - we are all going through silent struggles, and even if you're best friends, there might be things they aren't telling you, so it's your job (my job) to give people a little bit of grace and understanding throughout our journey through this life.
So, as we put on our party hats and thank God and Ice Cube for Friday, remember to treat others with the same grace and understanding you give yourself. It goes a long way.
ALSO: Strategy Saturday is tomorrow and the post will be focused on close reading in the content areas! Swoon - who doesn't love multiple reads and graphic organizers!
Enjoy Friday, loves - until tomorrow,
xo - Lucy
Welcome to Strategy Saturday - a weekly highlight of a best-practice that will help strengthen instruction and better prepare your students for success! This week, I want to talk about graphic organizers, vocabulary, and content areas.
When I speak about content areas, I am talking about social studies, science, and math - pretty much any subject other than ELA. I am isolating content areas, because vocabulary is such a critical piece to mastering their knowledge, especially if you are a student who is at-risk.
An at-risk student can be considered a student who qualifies for free/reduced lunch, a student who is ELL, or a student who is reading below grade level. A student can be at-risk in one or more categories, and that just raises the bar of need for that student, and should raise the bar for our teaching. That is where graphic organizers come into play - graphic organizers are a great tool to help students learn vocabulary in context and acquire words in such a way that their uses are transferable.
Vocabulary has such a special place in my heart - I wrote my master's thesis on this (I can e-mail it to those who want to read 80 pages on vocabulary and special populations.) So, I've done the research and put it into practice in my own classroom, where every student meets at least one at-risk category. So, let's get on with how to use this in your own classroom:
1. Select appropriate vocabulary.
- Make sure vocabulary words are tier II or tier III words - these are the words that have multiple meanings, cannot have their meaning derived from context clues or are related to a specific discipline. Examples: constitution, denominator, civil, producer
- Keep it short. I teach 5th grade and I do no more than 5 words per class session. Use your professional judgement.
2. Create in-context learning.
- For students who are at-risk, you CANNOT just simply give them the definition. No, absolutely not. We, humans, do not learn and acquire words that way. Even as adults, when we encounter a new word, we assimilate - what is it like, what is it not like, etc. We have to do this for our students - we have to scaffold that assimilation. You might have a child who speaks 4 languages in your classroom (I did) and that's a lot of vocabulary floating around their brain - help them nail it down.
3. PRACTICE.
- A student needs to interact with a vocabulary word between 15 to 17 times before they have gained full control, which means introducing it at the beginning of your lesson and not talking about it again is not a best practice. Make them use it. Hold them accountable. Don't underestimate their ability to use high academic vocabulary correctly. They will surprise you.
This is where graphic organizers come into play.
Miss Scott's Favorite graphic organizers: (All of these will be available to download - click here.)
1. Frayer Model: The Frayer model is an all time favorite. It focuses on students classifying words based on examples and non examples. It can be a four or five square model depending on your class needs. I use a five square model, because all words should be able to have a visual representation to go with their definition. A visual helps when they can't remember the word or definition, they can remember the picture. I use this to learn new vocabulary words, so there's a lot of teacher given information on mine, but you can easily use this as a formative assessment for a unit (Fractions) or a specific vocabulary word (States of Matter.) The possibilities are endless.
2. Vocabulary Matrix: These are great when you can group like words together. For example, I used a vocabulary matrix when we were learning about ecosystems, and my students created a matrix with the words: producer, consumer, decomposer, carnivore, herbivore, omnivore. All of those words describe organisms' place in food chains and food webs, so easily represented on a matrix. The matrix has similar components to a Frayer model: word, definition, characteristics, example, and visual. Again, it's helping students acquire vocabulary based on classifying.
3. Cloze Reading: This is a great vocabulary strategy to help students gain control of the vocabulary through meaningful activities. Students have to practice using the words to gain control and to assimilate them fully, and it's our job to facilitate those interactions. Cloze readings can be easily differentiated (adding a word bank, pictures or hints), they can be easily generated, and can be used at all grades levels for almost any content area. The idea is simple - given a piece of text with words omitted, students can fill in the blanks using their content and vocabulary knowledge. I use these are warm-ups, review, assessments, or word wall activities. I have shared an example - I created it in less than ten minutes, but you get the idea.
Wrap-Up
3 things you learned: Frayer models, vocabulary matrices, and cloze readings are just three of the ways to better your vocabulary instruction within your classroom.
2 things you might have questions about: How do you create an effective word wall? How do you encourage students to use the graphic organizers once created? These will be answered in a later Strategy Saturday.
1 interesting fact: A student needs to interact with a word 15 -17 times before they have acquired the full ability to use it.
Remember: all materials can be found here! PLEASE leave a comment or drop me a line, I am looking for feedback if you liked, loved, or hated it! See you next Saturday! (: xo
As the summer winds down, and the possibility of this blog becoming so much more than just my own twenty something diary of musings and life anecdotes - I really have been thinking about what do I want to share? What do I want this blog to become? So, I am starting with Strategy Saturday. Every week, I will be posting a new best-practice for whole group, small group, or individual instruction. I realize this is a specifically for teachers feature, but I have been thinking about other ways to reach everyone who reads my blog, so stay tuned for those - but until then, welcome Strategy Saturday.
This Saturday's post will be graphic organizers for vocabulary content instruction- so that's your sneak peek for Strategy Saturday - just one of the many things I have planned for this baby of mine.
You guys - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, the Internet - have embraced my journey, my continuous search for meaning, and my not-quite (finished) quarter life crisis, and I want Ginger On the Move to grow into something that will be lasting, so thank you for starting this journey with me, and let's get this party started! I haven't stressed this, but PLEASE comment and contact me - leave me feedback, ask questions - I would love to hear from you guys! (:
By the way: brag moment - I created the banner for Strategy Saturday, which I think is pretty good for my first time graphic design try.
So, until tomorrow, cupcakes -
xo
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