Update: February 2017
This year my teaching partner and I had the students display their information on cubes. We used similar questions, but required the addition of a portrait and a map of the explorer's route.
Original post (May 2015)
This school year, I changed how I teach explorers and the culminating assignment for the unit. I created notebooks and the forms shown below. Students read articles and text books and answered the questions in their notebooks.
I taught them about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Wants and we used that to look at the reasons explorers travelled.
Finally, I used my five paragraph essay forms -- available here -- to write about what they had learned. The introduction and conclusion paragraphs were about how explorers generally met needs and wants. The three detail paragraphs were about specific explorers.
This was a successful fourth grade research project.
Paul Janeczko is another artist with words I am sure to include in my classroom instruction. A Poke in the I shows the possibilities of concrete poetry. A Kick in the Head introduces many different poetry forms and gives expert examples of each.
Although these books are tough to read aloud, I find them worth sharing whole group with the document camera.
For an explanation of my rating scale, click here.
Find me at Goodreads.
Over the last several months, I have been sharing a series of five in a row games called Gomoku. The rules of the game are simple: roll two dice, perform the given operation, find a square with the answer, and the winner gets five squares in a row first.
This is also a way to introduce the number system to students. The first three games use whole numbers: Addition, Subtraction, and Multiplication. The next two games use rational numbers: Simplifying Fractions and Improper Fractions. I included an enrichment game with integers to introduce negative numbers.
"A good book has no ending." ~ R. D. Cumming
Have a good week,
My colleagues and I are predicting a teacher shortage. I don't know what it's like in your area, but here north of Seattle, we often have substitute jobs that go unfilled. At our school a maternity leave has been filled with someone without the correct endorsement.
Everywhere I went over spring break, I saw help wanted signs. More than one employer has told me recently that they are having trouble filling jobs. As the stress of teaching continues and teachers see other options, I predict we will have more than just substitute jobs going unfilled.
What's it like where you live and work?
