Clif Notes 4/8/19
50 Years Of Building The State & Now Global Workforce!
DATES TO REMEMBER
This Week - National Assistant Principals' Week
Monday - 8am Start for Extra Help
Tuesday - CTE PLCs
Wednesday - Academic PLCs; Report Cards to Students
Thursday - Academic PLCs, Little Shop of Horrors
Friday - School Spirit, Little Shop of Horrors
Upcoming:
4/15 - Delcastle Hosting Board Meeting
4/16 - Steering Committee Mtg.
4/17 - Mandatory Senior Class Mtg., 8:15am, Auditorium
4/18 - Faculty Liaison Mtg.; Blood Drive in Gym
4/19-28 - Spring Break
4/29 - School Re-Opens
Taste of Delaware
HOSA
Congratulations to all of our students who competed in this year’s Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA) Competitions. The competitions were held at the University of Delaware's Star Campus. Special thanks to all of our Health Career Area teachers who prepared our students to perform at a very high level. Please congratulate them when you see them. Delcastle won the following medals:
- Ciani Colon 12 BM T-shirt Design (Silver)
- HOSA Bowl Team - Bryana Henson 10 MA, Maritza Mendiola-Flores 11 MA, Kayla
Wiley 11 NT, Erissa Negron 11 NT (Bronze)
- Paola Ceballos-Vazquez 10 MA Pin Design (Bronze)
Freshman Orientation
We would like to thank everyone who assisted with welcoming our incoming freshmen on Saturday, April 6th. Over 10 staff members and 60+ students came together to make Saturday a success. More than three hundred and sixty-eight students attended the welcome. This was the first time that we did not test students. However, our students engaged in a number of teambuilding and leadership activities thanks to Mrs. Bainbridge, Mrs. Denison, Mr. Dorsey, honor society and our student council students. Multiple students shared that they loved the engaging activities and are super excited to come to Delcastle in the fall. In addition, many of our parents relayed that they enjoyed the interactive parent Peardeck session conducted by Mr. Dorsey and the admin team. Special thanks to all the staff members who worked registration, sports tables, and the school store. Thanks again for making a great first impression.
Congratulations
Insert Learning Chrome Extension
Insert Learning is an instructional technology resource that allows you to transform a webpage, Google Slides, or Google Docs into an interactive lesson by inserting notes, highlights, videos, other technology resources (EdPuzzle, Quizlet, etc.), and discussion boards!!! (You get 5 free lessons.)
For a crash course in how to use Insert Learning, check out the presentation attached below.
As always, if you need more assistance or have questions please contact me.
~Tara
Delcastle Instructional Focus
Talking in the classroom
Content-Area Conversations
by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg
Explorers and Settlers
As with busy bees and walking review, this instructional routine also requires students to move about the room. However, this approach offers a bit more crowd control because only half of the students are in motion. The teacher begins by reminding students about the differences between explorers, who sought out new lands, and settlers, who cultivated the land and built permanent communities. Assign half of the students to the role of explorers (a good way is to divide the alphabet by last name), and explain that they will seek out settlers to discuss a question.
Ms. Lee does this activity in a rotation of three or four discussion prompts in her 5th grade social studies class. After assigning the roles, she posts the following prompts on the board:
- Discuss the ways of life of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest.
- Discuss the ways of life of the woodland peoples of the East.
- What did these two groups have in common?
- How did geography influence their different ways of life?
Ms. Lee used a countdown timer for each question so that the partners could monitor their discussion. As the timer approached zero, she invited the explorers to find a new settler and directed them to the next question.
There are variations of the explorers/settlers theme, including couch potatoes/aerobics instructors (physical education), electrons/protons (science), and carriers/borrowers (mathematics). Purposefully planning when using this strategy can scaffold language for students who are learning English. You can, for instance, assign students at early levels of proficiency to be explorers and then assign the settlers to be the first ones to speak. This approach provides an opportunity for English language learners to hear the language of other more proficient students and rehearse what they might say before they have to speak. When you ask them to repeat the process, it provides multiple opportunities for them to hear and use language related to the same question.
Inside/Outside Circles
In Chapter 3, Ms. Schmidt used inside/outside circles during her lesson in her 5th grade social studies class. This strategy also requires student movement and is intended to extend thinking through multiple conversations. Two concentric circles of students stand and face one another. The teacher poses a question to the class, and the partners talk for a brief time (usually 30–60 seconds). At the signal, the outer circle rotates one position to the left to face a new partner. The conversation continues for several rotations.
Mr. Garland uses inside/outside circles in his 10th grade English class to get discussion going about a thought-provoking question. "You've got to ask a good, meaty question," he cautions, "or they'll run out of things to say pretty quickly." His class will be reading a variety of titles to explore the essential question "When does the desire to obtain something or someone become destructive?" For several minutes, students explore this idea with a series of partners, while Mr. Garland listens in on the conversations. "It helps me to make connections to books I am going to discuss with them, and reminds me of what's in the heads of 15-year-olds."
Barrier Games
Much of what students are required to do in school is performance driven—solving math problems, completing science labs, and the like. A tremendous amount of academic discourse is needed to do such tasks, but English language learners sometimes rely on other methods of communication, such as gestures, to substitute for technical vocabulary. Barrier games are joint tasks completed by partners who have an obstruction blocking their field of view. For them to succeed, they must rely on clear communication and precise vocabulary. Here are some examples of barrier games:
- Sequencing a set of pictures in the correct order to illustrate the steps to making and glazing a ceramic pot
- Giving a partner directions to draw the life cycle of a butterfly
- Describing the difference between two similar illustrations of molecules
- Solving a crossword puzzle where each partner has half of the clues
Mr. Dare requires the students in his woodshop class to be able to correctly name each type of equipment used in the class. He assigns partners and places a low cardboard shield on the desk so that they cannot see the cards the other holds. One partner has an unlabeled photograph of a piece of shop equipment, while the other has written descriptions of each. The partners work together to describe and match each photo with its correct name and purpose. Only after students have completed this task are they allowed to operate any of the equipment.
Managing Talk in Groups
Some instructional tasks require the give-and-take of a slightly larger group of students. Collaborative learning among four students is a bit more active than partner activities, so the noise meter is useful when setting up these tasks. In addition, group tasks tend to be a bit longer than those accomplished in pairs, so a display of elapsed time gives students a way of monitoring their progress and adjusting their rate of work.
Continue reading next week....