Becoming Word Wizards Kick-Off Lesson

July 19, 2018

We have had a busy, but fun summer getting ready for the upcoming school year. Time is really flying by! Over the next few posts, we want to share a few new things we are going to be doing this year.

To start off the summer, we hung up our teacher hats and became students again, when we took the class Own Your Words: Effective Vocabulary Instruction through Advancement Courses online. The focus of this class was to implement robust vocabulary lessons and assessments to help students internalize their own academic vocabulary and then use it in their own communications.

As Jim Rohn states, "Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future." These words reminded us of the monumental responsibility that we have to each and everyone of our students. Our ultimate goal, as third-grade teachers, is to elevate our students' literacy skills to a level in which they can begin to understand the world around them, as well as communicate effectively with those in the world around them. To reach our goal, we thought, "Would it be a good idea to step up our game when teaching vocabulary?"

The course answered this question with a resounding yes.We learned we needed to tweak some things this year and make small changes that we believe will have a huge impact on our students' vocabulary knowledge. We also realized that our instruction was really only for short term learning or understanding of the words. It needs to be more robust for students to retain these words on a long term basis. However, it did validate the activities we used with our students.

Many of the activities that we will share with you over the next few blogs are based on the research and ideas from Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan in their book, Bringing Words to Life. At times we will even throw in some activities, thoughts, and articles from the well respected Robert Marzano.

To kick off our vocabulary instruction for the year, we want to get our students excited about words and make them aware of the amazing words that can be found all around them, within the four walls of our classroom, and in the world around them. We want them to view words as magical keys that allow them to have an unlimited vision and future. Below, we are sharing with you our kick-off lesson to this year's vocabulary instruction.

Kick Off Lesson

More lessons, assessments, and games inspired by Isabel L. Beck, et al., will be coming your way soon.

Kim and Anne

New Ideas With Charlie McButton

January 13, 2018

Good morning everyone! We just wanted to take a quick minute to share two highly engaging activities our students did after reading the narrative poem, Charlie McButton Loses Power by Suzanne Collins. The first activity comes from junior high teacher Christine Boardman-Moen's  book, BetterThan Book Reports. This book is filled with timeless activities that deepen students' reading experiences. We highly recommend checking out this book. We have used many of the activities in this book over the years.

The activity we chose is called The Story Tree. This activity helped the students review the literary elements of protagonist, setting, conflict, solution, and resolution, as well as allow students to reflect on their own opinion about the story. We believe the Story Tree also met the CCSS RL3.5 because students must refer to parts of the poem and describe how each successive part builds on earlier parts. Our students loved the challenge of describing each part of the poem with a given amount of words. They especially loved typing their work and putting a watermark behind it. We were pleased with the amount of conversation this activity promoted, as well as the excited energy it ignited within the students.

The second activity came from the Get Your Teach On conference. It involved the students creating a fake text message conversation using the website iFake Text Message. This activity addressed the CCSS RL3.3 because students had to identify the protagonist's (Charlie McButton) traits and feelings and explain how his actions contributed to the sequence of events.

This activity grabbed our students' attention immediately because text messaging is a part of their every day life.They couldn't wait to get started. They were charged with the challenge of having a conversation with one of their friends about some of Charlie's character traits. In that conversation, the students were required to support those traits with evidence from the poem. This was a challenge because it wasn't just straight forward- find the trait and find the evidence. That in itself requires higher level thinking. This upped the ante because they had to turn it into a conversation. Their conversation had to use all types of sentences and interjections to make it flow.

All of us loved this activity so much, we decided to use it with our next Common Core Standard, RL3.6, which is on perspective. We will share that with you next time.

Stay warm over this Martin Luther King holiday weekend. It is two degrees here in Chicago, and we are getting ready to get hit with snow!

Kim and Anne