Becky's Bulletin
5-12 Happenings
What's Up?
- Hard to believe it's the 4th quarter and officially spring!
- Spring FAST window opens April 18th! Interventions and progress monitoring should be underway to help meet the Spring benchmark.
- Unit for HS over SBL due April 18th-- let me know if you need any help or just want to talk through it!
Game of Life for Juniors
Juniors went to ILCC to participate in the Game of Life. Here students were setting their budget with a banker and gathering information about their student loans. They met with other businesses to get prices on food, rent, utilities, vehicles, insurance, cell phone, etc...and work it into their budget.
Reading end of book project
Students were working on their book project over their fantasy book. They could complete Quadramas, matchbook summaries (show here), Smuch books, or a timeline.
Diplomacy presentations
Students researched countries to understand their political process, allies and enemies, and where they stood on some diplomatic issues. Once completed with this presentation they had to take question from the class and justify their country's stance on these issues. Great collaboration and presentations!!
Strategy of the Week- Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)
CSR can be used across content areas as a way to improve comprehension. The four main strategies used in this are: Preview, Click or Clunk, Get the Gist, and Wrap up. This is a great strategy to use the gradual release method to support students in all four parts and can be used with a variety of texts!
- Preview (before reading)- activating prior knowledge, generate predictions, look at headers, sub headers etc..
- Click or Clunk- (during reading)- This part can tie into other reading strategies maybe being used in your lesson- what parts "clicked?" What did you understand? and what parts were hard to understand (clunks.) How do we fix that? (rereading, breaking words apart to understand meaning, refer back to key idea, etc...)
- Getting the Gist-(during reading)- What is the most critical information that you read?
- Wrap Up- (after reading)- identify the most important or significant ideas and help with the understanding to review what they learned. (maybe pair with QAR strategy?)
- Student can track their understanding using a CSR learning log and if you wanted them to work in cooperative groups there are roles for this strategy also! (See resources for the explanation of the learning roles.)
Cooperative Learning Roles
Edutopia article explaining learning roles
Cue Cards
Resources that can be both engaging & used for formative assessments--
Technology resources to check out:
53 ways to Check for Understanding
Twitter chats schedule to join, participate, collaborate, or just follow-- it's like doing "PD in you PJ's." My favorites chats are: #2ndaryELA (Tuesdays at 7pm), #sblchat (Wednesdays at 8pm), #educoach (Wednesdays at 9pm), #iaedchat (Sundays at 8pm)
Want to try something new? Do you have questions or want to chat?
Let me know I would love to help!
Miss Kjellsen