Welcome back from spring break. I hope you all had a great time. This week at Washington Elementary was great. During the lunch hours, several volunteers from GWU came to help with a duty-free lunch. GWU SOE provided a taco bar for the staff as a token of gratitude toward Washington. We appreciate all they have done for our program, and it was a great experience to work with all grades in a day. A tiring experience, but a really informative one. In my classroom, students were working on a map of their own island with a map key. It was great to see them talking about something other than math and literacy. Those things are EXTREMELY important, but learning how to navigate a map is important, too.
For my outside research, I have focused on technology and literacy and Depth of Knowledge activities for students. The picture below has several ideas for students who need to be challenged. There are some students who will know how to do something before you teach the lesson. It will help to have tricks to challenge them. I thought this chart was neat. I got the chart from http://teachingwithhaley.com/2016/01/24/supporting-gifted-and-talented-students/ .
For the technology assisted literacy portion, the website flocabulary.com is awesome. Flocabulary has songs and videos for just about everything from elementary to high school. My CE recommended this to me. Her students love the rap songs that flocabulary.com offers. This specifically assists with the vocabulary development in student's learning.
In my future classroom, I would like to use flocabulary.com as well as some of the ideas listed in the chart above. They both seem like they would benefit my students, and my students would enjoy the challenge of the activities and the fun of flocabulary. The flocabulary videos connect well to the NCPTS because it directly relates to standard 3 which states that teachers make instruction relevant to students. My students at Shelby Intermediate LOVE flocabulary. They actually asked if they could make their own raps through their poetry unit.
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| "Choose Well" |
Everyone has the choice to choose to see the beauty in every day. Choose joy this week, friends. As much as you can, choose joy.
Stay encouraged,
Mallory
Mallory I think that is awesome that your students were learning how to read maps. With today's curriculum many teachers get carried away with doing math and English Language arts and forget how important social studies and science are as well. Flocabulary sounds like a great website and that is definitely something I would want to use in my future classroom. I think it's awesome how it is available for many different grade levels. Lastly, that quote is spot on because I was just talking about how stressed I am so thank you for the reminder that it is a choice. Instead of choosing to be stressed, we need to choose to have joy!
ReplyDeleteHi Mallory,
ReplyDeleteI am glad your classroom is learning about maps. When I am in the school, all I hear about is Math and Literacy. More than likely students will be using maps several times throughout their lives. I also love the website you selected, flocabulary. In fine arts, I have been learning how important music is to a classroom. Students love nothing better than a catchy song and the good thing about these songs is the information they learn in the lyrics will help them remember the information covered in the lesson. Thank you for the picture at the end. I needed that.
I wish you the best.
Yes, choose joy!
ReplyDeleteI am so proud of your continuation of research on DOK - this will be a powerful resource for your future classroom!