Light bulb Teaching

Each month in my classroom we have a quote that is on display. I chose a range of quotes where the message can be related in a classroom setting, either in terms of learning, socialising with others, striving for success, attitude, etc.

We also discuss who said the quote so some background knowledge can be developed, as students learn a little about some of history’s most prominent characters.

I refer to the quote throughout the month, where relevant. You can also use the Quote of the Month for extension tasks. Students can;

- research more about the person to which the quote is attributed

- find other quotes that are similar or are by the same person

- make their own display, bookmark, artwork etc for the quote.

With the quote I sometimes use it as a sentence of the day study, analysing punctuation, grammar and vocabulary, or even get the students to write and illustrate the quote in their handwriting or publishing book.

Here are some samples of the quotes I have used.

To download 20 readymade posters with quotes, click here.

To find more quotes online for students, click here, here and here.

There are always little moments as a teacher where something wonderful, even miraculous can occur. Sometimes without warning, these little moments make teaching worthwhile.

I was lucky enough to have 2 of these moments today.

The first one occurred during reading groups this morning. We were reciting a readers’ theatre text, and it was one of my more able groups. The scene was a mystery, aimed at students, with a parody on Sherlock Homes (the lead girl detective is called Shirley Homes). We discussed how you recite in character when reading readers’ theatre. I left the group for 5 mins to read their parts and practice their delivery.

When I returned, they had gone above and beyond my expectations. My student who was the narrator, used a dramatised American voice, which set the mystery perfectly, just like a voice over on a crime show, like Law and Order. We all had a laugh and added the Law and Order sound effect (‘duhn duhn’). We had Posh British accents for our detective Shirley Homes and her side kick Amber Watson. All the students in the group really got into character and we all enjoyed the performance.

The second lovely moment occurred during our HSIE lesson. We are learning about Global connections and today began our lessons on learning about Aid organisations and charities. We looked at the posters from the 8  UN Millenium goals.

In groups of 3, students were asked to read and look at the posters, asking questions and discussing the posters with their group. As I looked around, it was such a great moment. Everyone was engaged, there were people deep in discussion that usually don’t talk to each other. And the comments! The questions! There was real humility showing, some students were shocked at how some people in the posters lived, and they made comments about how grateful they were, how we take things for granted, some of them expressed sadness. For some students who do not have much contact with the wider global community, it was a lesson that they really connected with, and had genuine questions and concerns.

What a great start to the next 4 lessons on Global Aid and Global citizens!

Here are the 8 millenium posters that we used.  They were taken from the Oxfam Uk site, which also has extensive teaching resources.

As a primary school Assistant Principal with a class of my own, disruptions and changes continually interrupt my teaching week. Even if you are not a member of the executive, school events, extra-curricular activities and special days can replace your teaching day or half your week!

No wonder we get behind and many teachers I have spoken to agree - “I plan for the term but only get half of it done!”

Over the years I have continually tried to find ways to program efficiently and ‘fit’ everything around the other events of school life. With an already over crowded curriculum, teachers now have to compete with carnivals, assemblies, rehearsals, planning days and out of the classroom professional learning.

A strategy that helps me work out exactly how many days I have to teach, and where my week is interrupted is to create a “Term Planner” before each term starts and BEFORE I begin my programming for the next term.

I create a calendar of the term laid out in weeks and days. Using colour shading, I block out any days where the whole day is allocated to other school activities.

See below:

As an Assistant Principal, I am always off class on Tuesdays for executive duties. So Tuesdays are blocked out in Pink. As you can see in Week 3, I will be away at a choir performance all day Monday and on Thursday we have our Athletics Carnival. Those and similar days are blocked out in blue. So I will only be teaching my class 2 days that week!

Once I blocked out all days, I also insert any other activities (PSSA, Assemblies etc) that will rule out a large chunk of a day or session. After this is done, I can see just exactly how much teaching time is left, and how much to put in my program. I colour code my subjects and activities too, and I may even put in the lesson topics.

This document is placed in my diary, my program and attached to my desk in my classroom. This is also helpful for any casual teachers who may come in to my room for a day or session.

If I know in advance how much time I will have left to teach I can alter my week or my fortnight accordingly. For example, my ideal arrangement would be to have literacy groups 4 times a week, as I have 4 groups to rotate through 4 different activities. But as you can see in this term, most weeks have a disruption. Therefore, I plan the literacy group rotation to go for 2 weeks, so everyone completes the four activities. It is so frustrating as a teacher to have a group continually miss out on one of the crucial activities!

It’s also helpful to block out an afternoon every few weeks as ‘catch up’ so you can finish of anything that takes longer than anticipated.

You can see a whole term’s planner here.

Also, here is a blank term planner to fill in for your own class.

If you have any other ideas about how to make programming and planning easier, please comment and share!

I was first introduced to the idea of word clouds and the well-known website wordle a few years ago. ‘What a fantastic concept!’ I thought. A great way to create brainstorms in class and make them more interesting, and a great visual way to present lists. I could see that it would be useful during class discussions, spelling lessons and Humanities lessons. However, the wordle site is not very ‘kid friendly’- you cannot save your image, you can only add it to the database or print it. Most NSW classrooms are not privy to masses of colour copying, and unless you print it right there and then, it is very hard to find your word cloud again. Also, the gallery of images on wordle is not filtered of content and language choices, so if students were using it they could stumble across inappropriate word clouds.

Another popular site is tagxedo, a fancier version of wordle. Initially it seemed that it would have many benefits, but I found that this is a difficult website for students to manipulate.

Finally, only this year, I found a kid website with a basic word cloud creator – ABCya. This is a site for educational games and activities online. Their word cloud creator is perfect for students to use independently. You can SAVE your work or print it. The fonts are kid friendly and don’t have inappropriate names (talking about you- wordle) . The only improvement to the abcya word cloud tool would be to include the option of diagonal layouts.

I am always investigating ways to increase the incidental writing that i can get my students to do. As they get older many students begin to dislike writing, I think this correlates with the time that writing changes from writing a few sentences (K-2) into writing ‘text types’ with paragraphs. Last year when I had an all boys class, I was faced with two thirds of the class being very ‘anti-writing’. I had to try to promote as much incidental, daily writing as possible.

I had used journal writing in the past, but found many students had ‘writers’ block’ when left to write their own thoughts. Journal writing topics are great, I found  a lot of ideas here.  I developed a journal writing topic that gave the students the content for their writing. I linked this to social skills, cultural events, class topics and student interest and made sure that a range of writing styles and genres were covered.

To promote vocabulary, I used a ‘word of the day’ study and combined it with my journal writing.  I created templates for the journal writing.

Click here: journal writing to access the templates. (NB: They are Australian based. Some fonts may not load if you are opening this PDF on a MAC)

As I had an all boys class, I did a little bargaining. One of the Journal Writing tasks I substituted for Journal Drawing. I gave them a specific drawing task as they all loved drawing.

Click here: journal drawing to access my journal drawing template.  (NB: They are Australian based. Some fonts may not load if you are opening this PDF on a MAC)

This year I am back on a Co-Ed Class, and am continuing to use Journal Writing. I have added an Extension section, as I have a lot of fast finishers, and this can include the Journal drawing options. I have also created a handwriting activity to substitute for one of the Journal Writing tasks. This sheet gets stuck in our handwriting book not our journal, and the extension tasks continue our handwriting skills, with a social skills focus.

I try to do three journal writing/handwriting sessions a week with a word of the day. I don’t have my class on Tuesdays due to Assistant Principal commitments. Having only 3 a week gives me flexibility to move one around if changes occur, or if for some reason I’m not there!

In the summer holidays I attended a conference and was lucky to attend 3 workshops run by Laurie and Spencer Kagan. The Kagan’s have revolutionised the idea of Cooperative Learning, Something I believed I was doing well, until their workshops!

Yes I was using cooperative learning strategies to some extent, in a random manner. ‘ Turn to the person next to you and share your ideas’, ‘Find a partner and work together’, ‘Tell your group’ were common phrases I was using. The Kagan’s strategies for cooperative learning (or ‘structures’ as they call them) are nothing new, good teachers have been using them in one way or another for years. But their structures are presented to the class in an explicit way, teaching the strategy from start to finish.

Each structure has been designed for maximum classroom participation at all times. This removes the situation of the smarter or more outspoken students dominating group time by speaking too much or doing all the work. Roles, responses and tasks are demonstrated before each structure is carried out.

One of the structures I have used this year is Talking Chips.

Here are the 4 steps that you explicitly teach the students. These slides come from the DVD.

I bought two packets of poker chips from the $2 shop. I found you needed to teach the children not to ‘play’ with the chips, there was a lot of tapping and spinning of the chips the first time we did Talking Chips. We did it for some brainstorming activities in Literacy and History lessons. After reading a text we did talking chips for naming all the characters, and for our topic on The Australian Gold Rush we did it naming miners’ equipment. At this stage I am using talking chips as a way to recall knowledge. I have been using other Kagan Structures for the sharing of ideas.

It was very successful, due to the novelty of using the poker chips. I have found that if I overuse the Kagan Structures for Cooperative Learning that the kids tend to get over it, so it’s been useful rotating a few each fortnight. I am looking forward to implementing more structures soon!

I’ve missed girls. I would never have thought that, but it has been refreshing having them in my classroom again.

I was so excited last year at the challenge of an all boys class in a co-ed school. But a year later and back on a regular mixed gender 5/6 class, I realise how much I missed having females amongst the group. And I’ve missed them for all the typical generalisations!

Girls are quieter workers. Ahh near silence, oh I’ve missed thee. Boys like to chat about their learning, constantly. It’s true what they say, girls whisper, but boys shout!

Girls are neater and take greater care with their presentation. Let’s face it, most 11 and 12 year old boys are not interested in adding colours and embellishments to work. Drawing detailed pencil works yes, but colours, borders headings, that’s girls territory. I’ve also noticed the power of setting an example. I have 5 boys from last year, and by constantly celebrating and showing work with a high level of presentation those boys are now taking more care, writing neater and adding a little bit more colour.

Girls are more peaceful and caring (sometimes!) I have a lot of gentle, peaceful, helpful girls and it’s amazing seeing those traits spread through the class and help keep it settled!

I feel renewed again this year, back on a co-ed class after last years’ challenges. My teaching has definitely improved after having an all boys group and I am already implementing some of my ‘boys strategies’ in my 2011 class. Here’s hoping it will be a great year ahead!

An inspirational poster to start the year…

With 3 days of term left for 2010, no doubt teachers all over Australia are pulling their hair out trying to keep their kids engaged and on task, without creating too much mess or requiring too much effort. Especially if you teach older students. Especially if you have year 6.

Christmas craft, end of year concerts, lesson plans from Blockbuster, cleaning up, games days are all good ways to keep them busy and maintain your sanity.

With a class of 20 senior boys I doubted Christmas craft would engage them for the last 2 weeks. So I gave them a mini in class project. After working out which ‘Intelligence’ we identified with (From Howard Gardner’s Theory), they got to choose their own activities form a list of 35. They were grouped into intelligence types and covered a range of tasks on the topics of  Energy and Electricity. They had to total 20 points worth of work to be handed in on the second last day of term.

Well with a class of boys the majority of learners identified themselves as being ‘Bodily Kinaesthetic’ – no surprises then that they all chose to BUILD something!  Cars, houses, lighthouses, switches, circuits… the room shortly looked like a war zone, with electrical equipment and construction craft everywhere.

EEK!  End of the year, I’m preparing to move classrooms and I’m making more mess!  This was a bad idea. But then I notice… everyone is on task. Sure they are noisy, and messy but busy tinkering and talking and thinking. And they are working on these tasks ALL DAY. So I’m accepting the mess and letting them finish the year enjoying the time to create, innovate and debate. Oh and I have some Christmas tasks ready, just in case.

As a highly organised person, nothing refreshes me more than reorganising my desks and my classroom layout. In my first year or two of teaching I used to change it each term. After a while I found classroom designs that work, that suit the ergonomics of the classroom and the needs of the students. Rows, U shapes, Groups, Pods, Single desks, each layout type has its pros and cons.

I’ve always been a ‘groups’ fan, and rarely utilise rows and single desks, mainly because it eats up the floor space. I love having huge areas of space for kids to move around and stretch out on the floor to work. I’ve found groups work very will younger students, but as older kids have more equipment and longer limbs, tables in groups can lead to problems.

This year I have an all boys class, and I finally have implemented a seating plan that I’ve been interested in for some time. The tables are set up around the perimeter of the room, facing the wall. There a few pods of seats that pop out in a group, but the rest are against the wall. This layout allows me to have ample floor space for boys to use, and it means we don’t have to move furniture each time we want to work in a circle, or do some dancing etc.

As well as this, no desk  is owned by a student, they can choose where they work each day, even during the day. It helps that I have more desks than students too. Some prefer working on the floor with a mat, I allow that too. They can work near doors and windows, in groups, alone in corners, the opportunities are endless. It also means no one is annoying each other by kicking under the desk, and I can walk around the room, peer over everyone’s shoulder and see what they are doing.

When I have maths groups with a co-ed group I use the same layout and it works perfectly.  I think I will use this layout for all senior classes in the future!