NWE Game Plan!
News You Can Use!
Friday, October 30, 2015 [Volume 1, Issue 2]
News from the Instructional Coach!
Teaching in Isolation is a Thing of the Past!
Deepening Literacy Skills During Math Instruction
What is the one thing we as teachers never have enough of? Time! Time is something that we cherish because we always want and need more. We need more time to teach the standards, more time to deepen our student's understanding of the literacy standards, math standards, science standards and.... well you see the point. With this being said, time is not our friend and will do not get extra, so we need to make the most of the time we are given.
One way to conquer the lack of time is by double dipping into the time we have available. You may be asking yourself, HOW IN THE WORLD WILL I BE ABLE TO BRING MY LITERATURE STANDARDS INTO MY MATH LESSON? Well, here are just a couple of ideas that were generated during our professional development this week. You can take these ideas and tweak them to work for your classroom in the best way for your students.
When you are planning, choose your literacy standard, for example every grade level has the standard that has something to do with CHARACTERS IN A STORY. What is often utilized during math lessons in grades K-5? Math stories.
So here is what you can do:
1. Describe the character in the story. The character can be taken out of a math story and it does not change the process of the math. However, if you remove the character for a fiction story it changes the story altogether. This is a powerful message to pass along to kids. During your math lesson, if you take out the names, does the math change, no.
2. The actions of a character. Do the actions of character in a math story determine what is happening in the math problem? Making a connection between that and a fiction story can deepen a student's understanding of a character's action having an affect on the story line. In math, the character's action may often tell the student what process is going to be used in the story, will they add, subtract, multiply or divide? Is the character doing one thing? One step problem. Is the character doing two or more things. Multi-step problems.
3. Test taking strategies. When we are teaching those test taking strategies or the genre of testing, we want to make sure our students understand what is "fluff" in word problems. In literacy, we also want to make sure they know what information is not important to the storyline. When we can reference back and forth between the domains of Math and Literacy, that transfer of knowledge allows for deeper understanding.
Students need to have this modeled over and over. They need to hear you reference the novel you are reading during your math lesson. Then you can start asking questions during your math lesson like:
*How is this story problem like our book?
*Does this character have any traits like the character in our book?
*Can you find the action in this word problem?
*Is there a verb in this word problem?
*What would be a synonym for "addition"?
*What would be an antonym for "equation"?
I hope you find this helpful. Let me know if I can do anything for you! I am here to serve!
News from your Literacy Coach!
Building Text Talkers, Text Writers and Text Thinkers!
As teachers we need to orally and visually model these things repeatedly...
TALK as TEXT TALKERS!
WRITE as Text Writers!
THINK as TEXT THINKERS!
Just like we WALK the WALK each day as EDUCATORS!
Show Me The... Text Evidence
Textual Evidence Sentence Starters
Evidence Based Terms
News from your EC Program Coach
The Slow Learner
Slow learners are described as students whose cognitive and achievement abilities fall significantly below the average score of 100, (generally in the 85-70 range). Their scores are not low enough for them to be eligible for special education, even though they may be struggling in the classroom. These students make up about 14% of the student population and account for most of our high school drop outs. These students represent a large portion of our children who are frequently retained, referred for special education (often several times throughout their school careers), become pregnant, are placed in jail, use drugs, show aggression and other mental health problems, and are either underemployed or unemployed.
Characteristics
· Perform at a higher level when information is presented concretely. The more abstract the concept, the more difficult it is to learn.
· Difficulty with higher-order thinking or reasoning skills.
· Have gaps in their knowledge and basic skills.
· Do not transfer or generalize knowledge, strategies, or skills the same as their peers. They are capable of learning the information just as quickly, but struggle with applying it to new concepts or situations.
· Struggle with organizing new material in their head and relating that new information to what they have already learned.
· Struggle with time management and long term goals.
· Require extra practice and more time on task to develop the same understanding as their peers.
· Almost always develop motivation issues when it comes to academics. They are prone to anxiety, low self-image, and give up quickly.
Strategies For Success
· Use concrete instruction.
· Reduce audible and visual distractions.
· Provide opportunities for repetition and frequent practice of individual skills applied to different challenges.
· Help students develop basic time management and organizational skills.
· Break down lessons and tasks into short individual pieces.
· Use a variety of hands-on activities and computer-assisted instruction to reinforce learning.
· Expect and allow for success.
· Reward genuine effort.
· Provide a variety of ways to demonstrate competency.
· Pair students with peer mentors.
· Link academic learning to real-world experiences.
· Offer opportunities to have test errors redone correctly.
· Use mapping and graphic organizers.
· Help students become proficient with note-taking.
· Encourage the students’ involvement in activities that they enjoy and at which they can succeed.
News from your Digital Learning and Teaching Facilitator
Let's Learn More About OneNote Class Notebooks AND Become OneNote Ninjas!!
We all need innovative ideas for the classroom! OneNote Class Notebook is it! The OneNote Class Notebook feature lets you quickly set up a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities, all within one powerful notebook.
When you create a unique class notebook for your classroom, you are able to gather web content and embed existing lessons into the notebook to create custom lesson plans. These notebooks can include audio and video recordings to create rich interactive lessons for students. You and your students can use the powerful drawing tools (with careful mouse maneuvering on the laptops, on the Smartboard or with the tablets) to highlight, annotate slides, sketch diagrams and take handwritten notes. Students can turn in homework, take quizzes and view/retrieve handouts. Students can view their assignments in the content library (paper reduction!!) and copy it into their notebook section. The teacher can grade and individualize support by typing and recording audio directly into the students assignment. The collaboration space encourages students to work together as the teacher provides real-time feedback and coaching. Check out this SWAY presentation and become a ONENOTE NINJA! https://sway.com/rq8btwPwKTUfRZ2F