Get Your Teach On Conference

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Hi Everyone!  Happy July!

I just got back from the Get Your Teach On Conference in San Antonio a few days ago.  I must say it was even more fabulous than I expected.  Hope King and her speakers were very inspiring and had exciting ideas to share with us.  The overall theme of the conference was engagement.  Engaging students is critical if we are going to help them enjoy learning to a point of wanting to be life-long learners.  However, engaging students does not mean just having a bunch of fun, hands-on activities for students to do.  Every single engagement activity shared was connected to the standards we need to be teaching our students.  As we know, some of these standards are boring or difficult to get across to students, and that is where applying engaging activities comes into play.

The two days I spent at this conference were chocked full of ideas.  I learned about transforming the classroom into a totally new environment to excite students about a unit of study, creating songs to sing about difficult reading and math concepts, using costumes and props to grab their attention, playing games, using new websites and applications, and new twists on how to teach close reading and the writing process. Of course I want to try them all, but I know that will be overwhelming.  As Anne and I plan our lessons for the upcoming school year, we will try to incorporate a few of my favorites.  Some ofthem do include stepping outside of my comfort zone and trying something new, but I guess that is the only way to grow and become better.

Here are a few pictures of some activities I would like to try.

Team Building/Stem Activity.  A good activity to do at the beginning of the year or anytime students need to be reminded of how to work together.

Groups of students use gummy candy to make a maze.  Then another group tries to move a gum ball through the maze to the end.  It was so much fun.

Get Your Neon Read On. A cool way to introduce close reading.

Kids make neon glasses to use while they read a nonfiction text.

Students read a nonfiction text and go through the checklist.  Of course, you must spend time teaching them these steps.

Once the students figure out the text structure in Read One, they then highlight each new detail in a different color highlighter.  They should use the key details found in Read One to help them decide which details are important.  Then, for Read Three the student turn out the lights and use a blacklight to make the important details stand out.  They use them to summarize the text and draw conclusions.  

Costumes.  This is definitely an idea that is out of my comfort zone, but I have an idea that Anne and I can do for our beginning of the year kick off to science.  I'll take pictures and post if we have the guts to do it.

If you can see here, Hope King is dressed up like an army soldier because she is teaching use writing lessons from her Writing Boot Camp unit.

Room Transformations.  I'm still brainstorming ways Anne and I can transform our classroom with a unit of study.  I'm thinking about our fairy tale unit...but I don't have any great ideas yet.  This will be another "out of my comfort zone" activity.

This is Hope King's spy lab.  She created this to engage the students in identifying important details and summarizing.  Use the link above to read more.

The above activities show just a drop in the bucket of the cool things I learned at this conference.  I will share more as we incorporate them into our lessons this year.  If you want more detailed information about Hope King and her amazing talents visit her website.  And if you ever have a chance to attend a Get Your Teach On Conference I say go!  It is amazing to see and listen to this very talented young teacher.

Kim