I'm Back!!!!.... and teaching vocabulary!

I'm back! I totally apologize to all my readers for disappearing for the last couple of months.  I took my first real grad class this fall and had no time to breathe.  Something had to give and unfortunately it was my blog.  But, the class is over and I am back!  I have so much to tell you but instead of one long post, be looking for short posts over the next week or so to catch you up!

The class I took was TONS of work but also very rewarding.  In Massachusetts, if you have even one student in your class who is and English Language Learner, you need to take a class called Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL). It's basically an intro to ELL and walks you through tried and true activities that helps ELLs succeed in the classroom. Being my second year in district, I found the class to be EXTREMELY helpful and my biggest takeaway is direct vocabulary instruction. I have always felt that vocabulary is such an important part of teaching social studies and last year I just knew I wasn't cutting it. My students were just understanding vocabulary on the most superficial of levels and I knew it was because I was teaching a population I had never really experienced before.

In the class they taught us a vocabulary activity called the Seven Steps to preteach vocabulary. Here is a fabulous example of Seven Steps from an elementary teacher:

I knew this was exactly what I needed but I decided to tweak it for my class.  Now, almost every day, my kiddos walk in and we preteach a word or term they are going to need in order to understand the upcoming content (Tier 2 and Tier 3 Words). We do it in the same order every day:

1. Introduce word and have them pronounce it twice.  Ask if they know anything about the word and identify and prefixes, suffixes, and/or base words.
2. Have them write down a student friendly definition.
3. Tell them how we are going to use it in content.  I also like to tell them how it is used in other contexts (for the word "convention" this week, we talked about the Constitutional Convention but we also talked about ComicCon).
4. I show the kids a YouTube video that better illustrates the word or a visual.
5. Lastly, the students are given a sentence stem that they need to finish with the students in their table groups.  We then share out as a class.

This method has truly revolutionized my class!  Not only are the kids truly understanding the vocabulary, it has allowed me to frontload my teaching.  As an example, I taught the term Articles of Confederation three days before we really learned about the Articles of Confederation.  The kids absolutely love it and have been acing their vocab quizzes like champs.  They can use the words weeks later in a sentence and I really feel like it has helped me make bigger connections in my content. 

I showed two different videos with this term.  The first clip, I explained to them, is how the British knew how to fight and the second video was how the Americans learned to fight from the native Americans.  We were able to compare and contrast the two styles and this whole lesson took less than ten minutes of my class.

If you're interested, I have started to gather together these vocab lessons and have made them available on Teachers Pay Teachers.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Mesopotamia-and-First-Civilizations-Direct-Daily-Vocabulary-Instruction-1675580

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/American-Revolution-Direct-Daily-Vocabulary-Instruction-1672787

Head on over to TPT to check these out and look for more as I progress in the year!

Social Studies Labs

So I gave myself a goal this year. I want to add as many hands on, experiential activities into my class as possible. So far, they have been an amazing success! I blogged about this activity last month.

This week my kiddos got to experience what it felt like to be a hominid. They looooooved it and beg for more labs!!!

Homo Erectus building their tower.

Neanderthal and Cro Magnon

Homo Habilis very proud of their horrible tower and their lack of fine motor skills.

Click here and check it out!

Posted with Blogsy

Speed Dating and Tallest Tower

Woo hoo!  Three day weekend!  My kiddos and I have had an amazing start to the year but I sure deserve this weekend!  I've been having some fabulous stuff going on in my class lately.

1) I'm still totally in love with Plickers!
Plickers is better than ever and just did some amazing upgrades to their website.  You can now make multiple choice questions and create the questions online to save for later.  I use these a lot in class and was trying to find a streamlined way for us to use them at the beginning of class.  Voila!!!  I had them paste them in the back of their interactive notebooks.

Now Plickers is even quicker and more useful than it was before!

2) I have a huge number of ELLs in my class and they are amazing.  We are noticing that they really don't like to speak academically.  I've decided that is one of my focuses this year and employed a trick from last year.  The kiddos did an awesome activity on the possibilities of what may have happened to the inhabitants of Roanoke.  In the end, the kiddos had to make a claim about what they thought happened.  Before I sent them to pen and paper I wanted them to be able to discuss their ideas and get feedback from others.  So I did the only thing that made sense....
I made them SPEED DATE!!!!!
I partnered up the kids and gave them questions that would help them solidify their claim.

They had to minutes to discuss it with their partner but their was one rule..... no writing.  After two minutes they had to switch partners and the speed dating wasn't done until they had worked with all four questions.  It was wonderful and I got the most amazing responses out of my kiddos.

3) I created an amazing History Lab for my little ones.  We were learning about the types of government and I decided to focus on just monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, and monarchy.  The students had the task of building the tallest freestanding tower with minimal supplies.  Each person, though, was given a task and role that mimicked a different type of government.  The kids experienced each government and played roles such as monarch, dictator, elected official, heir, and average person.  To add to the excitement of the building the tower, I played this music in the background (after being inspired by my Thursday night #sstlap Twitter group to add more music to my classroom.)

*** In the dictatorship station, the dictator could send students to the corner for no reason whatsoever.

If you are interested in this activity in its entirety, click here and check it out!

Lastly, I've been dipping my toes in Whole Brain Teaching and would love any feedback/suggestions middle school teachers have about implementing it in the classroom.

Have a great 3 day weekend!

Why do they keep murdering people in my classroom?

Ever since I staged the Boston Massacre in my classroom, my seventh graders have been begging for a similar experience. I was going to wait for 8th and make it a rite of passage and then I asked myself, "Why?" Exploration should not be saved. I knew I wanted to do something with Julius Caesar and I totally lucked out to find exactly what I needed on a fabulous website run by an amazing Mr. Kevin Roughton. He is an amazing teacher (whom I have never met; I'm entirely an online groupie). Who puts ALL of his resources for Ancient World History online for free. To say that his work is engaging and amazing is an understatement. I have been using his interactive notebook ideas all year and was excited to give one of his activities a whirl. I decided to do his Cold Case: Rome activity, which would have the kids decide the true motive for Caesar's death; was it to save the empire, was it jealousy, or did Caesar actually know all about it and decided to die in a blaze of glory? His lesson includes an amazing launch video he created and 12 different stations with evidence at each. What is fabulous, is that he made the autopsy report look like an autopsy report, quotes from bodyguards looked like affidavits, etc. I decided to out my mark on it and start with a hook. The kids had a basic day close reading and foldables ahead of them but each table got to spend ten minutes taking detective notes on a mysterious scene of a crime that had shown up the night before.

As they were observing and taking field notes, I heard one of my reluctant kiddos lean over to another one and say, "Man, Wilkins always goes big or goes home." Yeah! Win for me! At the end of class we discussed our observations and linked it with any background knowledge the kiddos already had.

 

The next day they walked into 8 stations. I launched the activity with my own launch video that I made with iMovie and my fabulous app that I couldn't gush over more, Green Screen by Do Ink.

 

They then spent about five minutes at 8 stations answering two to three questions per station. One station was a video and another was an audio recording.

 

At the end, the kids had to choose one of the three motives an write an endictment with textual evidence. Voila! It's a Common Core activity in disguise.

The kids had an amazing time and we will totally be doing this again. Check out Mr. Roughton's website....you will not be disappointed!!

 

Posted with Blogsy

Social Studies Brackets, Word Walls, and Interactive Notebooks....oh my!

Another great couple of weeks in the book!  The hubs, kiddos and I got our third bout of strep throat but we weathered through it and we can finally see the other side.  School wise... knock on wood... everything has been bliss.  The kids have hit a sweet spot, academically, where I can continually ask for more and a greater percentage rise to the challenge.  Here's a breakdown of what I've been doing:

1. Civilization Madness
We finallllllllyyyyyyy finished Mesopotamia and I wanted to finish it up in an engaging way but not too engaging because the kids had just finished their Hammurabi plays.  I had been reading about using a bracket system in social studies.  You take multiple THINGS (people, events, etc.) and you have the "compete" in a March Madness type bracket system.  We had Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Chaldeans, Phoenicians and Hebrew compete against each other for "best" civilization.  I told the kids they were able to choose what made them the "best".  I launched with this....

...and then the fun began...

The kids loved the whole activity and it was a great way to summarize the whole unit.  If you are interested, click here to grab some of the resources so you can do this on your own!

2. Egypt!!!
Egypt is always fun and I decided to combine the spirit of genius hour with a Common Core research activity. I decided at the end of this unit, the kids would be able to choose any topic they found interesting and research it.  Instead of just a simple research and report, the kiddos need to make a claim and support it through research (i.e. "Mummification was disgusting." or "A woman's life was tough in Ancient Egypt.")  The kids will be able to support this claim with evidence and I'm going to have them present in a variety of ways.  I'm going to allow Go Animate, the Zimmer Twins, Google Presentation and basically whatever they want.  We just started our Egypt unit bit I wanted my early finishers to have a chance to start thinking about the project.  When I moved into my new classroom, I was amazed at the amount of nonfiction was there but I wasn't sure how to use singular books on a single topic.  I figured it out though...

When kids are done with class activities, they are able to peruse the books looking for possible topics.  So far, my early finishers love it.  By the way... isn't my word wall fabulous....

3. Rejuvenation of Interactive Notebooks!!!!
I love my interactive notebooks, but being my first year with new curriculum, I lost my path around November.  I really started to plan and document with the notebook and I see the buy in from the students increasing every day.

 It's so funny, the more I focus on the notebooks, the more invested the students become.  It really shows that what a teachers feels can go a long way.  We did a pretty amazing Constitutional Convention unit where the kids did text mapping while I worked with six kids at a time on the Great Compromise and the 3/5 Compromise.  I looooove when I get to figure out how to work small group teaching into a class of 27!  After we completed our unit, the kids had to pretend they were a member of the Constitutional Convention and were Tweeting at the scene.  I gave them an example......

Then they amazed me......

All in all... an amazing week!

If you are interested in some of the foldables, head on over to Teachers Pay Teachers and check out my newest activity.

Finally breathing!

I'm back!  It has taken me about three weeks, and many glasses of wine, for me to finally catch my breath in my new district but I'm finally getting there!  My new school is totally different than my old school.... But I love it so much.  My kids aren't different.... Kids are kids and I love them so much.  One of my kiddos, the other day, stopped my riveting lesson on the 50 states to say,"Miss.... We know you didn't choose the thug life.  The thug life chose you."  I responded, "I'm so happy someone finally understands me!"  Needless to say, we love each other.

So.... What have I been up to?

1. Setting up my room

My classroom was an old music room and is huge and awkward.  It doesn't have any bulletin boards and horrible walls.  I used a trick I saw on Pinterest and covered some of the walls with plastic tablecloths.  My husband suggested edging them with decorative duct tape and .... Voila!

2. I really wanted to start my new year with a bang so I used the first day activity from the book Teach Like A Pirate. I had the kiddos tell me something about themselves through the sculpting of play doh.  I'm cheap, so first I found a simple recipe on Pinterest and spent a Sunday making play doh with my midgets.

My new students looooooved this activity and made some amazing things

Musical notes

Bacon

A crown because she's a princess:)

Asian noodle

Volleyball

3. I did some really fun getting to know you activities using Twitter rules.  I had so many teachers come in to look at themI got  to meet a whole bunch of the staff! #yolo!!!

What do you need in a teacher?

What is your opinion of school?

What type of learning environment is the best for you?

4.  I've started our interactive notebooks and the kids already love them.

I'll have some amazing student work to show you next week.  If you are interested in some of the geography units I made for the interactive notebook, go on over to Teachers Pay Teachers and take a gander.

Lastly, I am making a big ole Common Core push this year so we will be studying primary sources till our eyes bleed.  If you are doing the same thing, you may want to look at my TPT store.  I have made task cards for both documents and artwork as well as offering both as a mega bundle.

Have a great week!