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Add Some Inquiry To Your Learning Targets

4/2/2022

For years I have approached learning targets with my students in the same way. We look at the target and the attached Marzano scale and I help them decide where their starting point is, then we start learning. It works fine, but I thought I could do a bit more with it. Then I tried adding a touch of inquiry...

SET UP

The set up is very simple. All you need to do is project your learning target (or have it written on the board).

STEPS

Once everyone is in class, direct your students to read the learning target.
Re-phrase the target as a question (EX: "I can identify what caused the Fall of Rome" becomes "What do you guys think caused the Fall of Rome?").
Clarify any definitions (EX: "What does the Fall of Rome mean?").
Give your groups of students 30-40 seconds to discuss the question and come up with possible hypotheses.
Once the allotted time has elapsed, ask for volunteers to share some of their hypotheses.
Ask some probing or clarifying questions to understand what they might be thinking or to clear up any misconceptions.
Record their hypotheses on the board and leave it until the end of class.

Commence your lesson as normal.

At the end of your lesson, revisit their hypotheses and determine which if any were correct, incorrect or partially correct and briefly discuss why.

This is an example of what my students came up with the other day when we were discussing the Fall of Rome. They did a great job!

TAKE AWAYS

I've been doing this for about a week now, and I love it. I think my students do too - they like seeing when their hypotheses wind up being correct and do a little, "Yes!" and point it out to their neighbors, and I think that's really the point - students getting interested and invested in their learning.

So, if you try this in your classroom (or do something similar), please let me know about it in the comments. And if you are looking for lessons with pre-made learning targets and Marzano aligned scales, check out my Interactive Notetaking or Complete Unit resources in my TpT store - each of them comes with several Marzano aligned scales along with the actual resources.

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Four Book Recomendations for Reading Month

3/12/2022

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I have a passion for books, especially books for kids. It's probably because I harbor a lifelong dream of writing them, or maybe because my wife Jen (follow her on the other half of this blog btw...) is an elementary reading interventionist. Either way, for this post I'd like to share four book recommendations for middle schoolers who are constantly saying, "I don't like to read" that I've read recently.

The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson is about a young girl who has to move with her mom away from the big city to a much more rural southern town. Once there, she befriends a neighbor who is facing his own challenges for being a little different. As their friendship grows, they come upon a decades old mystery that exposes a a great injustice from the town's racist past and prejudiced present.
If your students (or kids) love a good mystery and inclusive stories of friendship and acceptance, they'll love this book as much as I did.

Grenade and Refugee by Alan Gratz are incredible historical fiction books - one about an Okinawan boy and young GI at the end of WWII, and the other about four different groups of refugees - that do an incredible job of bringing the reader into events and minds of the past in a way that makes you feel the emotions of the characters in an amazing way.

Gratz does a great job weaving together different storylines into a single narrative showing similarities between seemingly unlike people and time periods in a way that literally took my breath away. In fact, there's a page-long passage in the middle of Grenade that made me have to literally put down the book and take a breath not just because of what had happened, but because of how it was written!

The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle - I saved my most recent favorite for last! This book about inclusivity, friendship and prejudice left me at times angry, sad, happy and with a lump in my throat.

It is the story of Mason Buttle, a very sweaty, very deliberate thinking dyslexic middle schooler who everyone thinks murdered his best friend. Fortunately for Mason, he found another friend in an undersized boy who moved in down the street. They are brought together by a common foe - bullies next door whose favorite sport is hurling apples at them with their lacrosse sticks.

Mason and his friend find shelter from their tormentors and a place for their friendship to grow inside an old root cellar. Eventually, Mason's names is cleared and his tormentors get their just desserts.

What makes this book truly amazing is they way it's told from Mason's point of view in Mason's voice. You turn the last page feeling like you are saying goodbye to an old friend. This may be my favorite book of all time!

So, I wish you and your students a very Happy Reading Month (why aren't there Happy Reading Month cards btw...), and hope you check out or pass on some of these recommendations to your students or teacher friends. Also, make sure to checkout my TpT store for great Social Studies resources, and follow this blog for great teaching tips, tricks and ideas.

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Virtual Conferences Made Easy... Or At Least More Efficient

2/26/2022

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My school's second conferences were last week, and were primarily done virtually. The first time we did virtual conferences, it became a little chaotic for me - lots of tabs open, clicking back and forth between different Google Hangouts, etc. This time, I found a really easy, efficient wat to stay organized and efficient and it didn't even take that much time to set up!

SET UP

For a couple of weeks before conferences, parents were encouraged to sign up for a 10 minute timeslot to talk with all four of their student's core teachers. Once our team had the time slots scheduled, we created a Google Sheet with the time, child and one of the child's Google Hangout links. We sent e-mails to the parents telling them which Google Hangout to use for the conference.

Our list of hangouts alternated between between two teachers on our team so that early parents wouldn't "crash" the wrong conference (something we learned from last year...), and it also allowed one of us to jump over to the next conference to get it going if things went a little long. It took a little practice, but got smoother and smoother as we went.

HOW I KEPT WHAT I WANTED TO SAY SHORT AND TO THE POINT

This is where the efficiency part comes in. Our conference slots were only 10 minutes per parent, so being quick and to the point was vital. My solution was to copy and paste our conference schedule into a new Google Sheet and add columns for "Positives to be Sure to Mention", and "Concerns to be Sure to Share". Then I went through each student on the list and made a quick note of the most important things I wanted to share. I also added a column for things to remember from the conference and one to record whether or not the parent showed up. This sheet wound up being great documentation of who we talked with and what we talked about as well as a record of who attended for our administration! Below is a picture of the Google Sheet (with student names blocked out).

So, if you have conferences - especially virtual conferences - coming up, or if you're looking for a way to get organized for next year, I highly recommend this method. And, if you are interested in other great teaching tips and tricks, please follow this blog and share it with anyone else who might be interested. Finally, if you have any conference (virtual or otherwise) tips or tricks you think might be helpful, please feel free to put them in the comments.

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A Quick, Low Prep Way to Practice Latitude and Longitude!

2/12/2022

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One of the basic geography skills my seventh grade students really struggle with is using latitude and longitude to find absolute location. I had been looking for a quick and easy, low prep way that didn't involve making a bunch of copies to practice latitude and longitude when I came up with this idea while driving to work!

PREP

I recently inherited a class set of the maps shown in the picture above from an older teacher, so I use them, but any map with latitude and longitude would work just as well - your students could even work in groups with larger maps.

Besides having maps, the only other preparation is using whichever map your students are going to use to find and write the latitude and longitude coordinates of various places or physical features - states, countries, oceans, bays, anything they can find - on notecards (also shown in the picture above).

STEPS

When your students enter the class, give each a 1/4 sheet of notebook paper and ask them to number 1-10 (or however many practice locations you want to do).
Shuffle your deck of locations (I think I have like 60 or 70 of them) so that this activity doesn't get stale, or they start memorizing the answers. - Brief aside - I learned this the hard way. All my students now know that the Laptev Sea can be found at 75 degrees North and 135 degrees East by heart...
Draw out cards and read out the latitude and longitude coordinates while writing them on the board. I also tell them what they're looking for - EX: "The state at ___North and ___ West."
At the end, we quickly check answers.

As a competition, I have been recording the percentage of each class that gets at least 80% correct (mastery). The classes like to compete against each other, and I am left with data showing this skill is increasing across all my classes - I have gone from the 40's% proficient to above 70% in all my classes!

So, I hope you like this activity, and if you use it, please let me know how it went in the comments. If you are looking for more basic geography building activities, please check out the resources I have to offer in my TpT store, and if you like what you see, please be sure to follow this blog and my TpT store for more great ideas!

Geography Resources
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A Quick, Easy, Low Prep Way to Review Vocabulary

1/29/2022

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I love teaching vocabulary, and utilize at least some of Marzano's 6 Steps for Vocabulary Instruction everyday. One of my favorite games (which is Marzano's sixth step) is vocabulary bingo. Here's how it works:

I post word wall tiles (click here to see a the ones I use for ancient Greece) on my wall throughout the school year. The result is that by the end of the year, students constantly see and remember all of our content vocabulary for the whole year. I also have written each of the vocabulary words on an index card. I carry the stack of cards around with me all the time to use a filler questions while slower workers are catching up or to quiz students in the hallway. I use both for these activity.

STEPS

When students enter the room, ask them to make a 5x5 grid on a piece of notebook paper (this is done with 4 vertical and 4 horizontal lines).
Ask them to place a vocabulary word in each square (25 terms, or 24 if you want to give a FREE SPACE).
Shuffle your index cards of words, and when you select a word, tell them the DEFINITION, not the word - the purpose of this game is to learn definitions, not recognize the words.
To extend the game, I have multiple winners - 5 in a row, 4 corners and whole card.

HINT - If you want to do this at a point in the year where you don't have 25 or more words yet, you can do it with a 3x3 grid too, it just goes faster.

If you don't have content area word wall tiles, and would like some, or would like to see what mine are like click the link below. Or, if you're looking for other great social studies resources, be sure to visit and follow my TpT store!

Vocabulary Resources
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Add Some Inquiry To Your Learning Targets

Four Book Recomendations for Reading Month

Virtual Conferences Made Easy... Or At Least More Efficient

A Quick, Low Prep Way to Practice Latitude and Longitude!

A Quick, Easy, Low Prep Way to Review Vocabulary

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