Open House

In California, we have Back-to-School Night at the beginning of the year where we tell parents what we'll teach throughout the year.  Then in the late spring, we'll have an Open House where the parents get to come in and see the fruits of what we outlined for them at B-T-S Night.  Open House is informal and fun.  And it's a lot of work!  I've taken what a lot of bloggers have done and used it gleefully for our Open House (which is tomorrow!) and the work the students produced was pretty spectacular.  Although I've saved work throughout the year, here is a sampling.

First up...Math Art.

I didn't want my students to know what I was up to, so we did the art part first.  I told them to pick between 4 and 6 colors.  Then I showed them how to make perfect one inch squares.  After we had our grid, I told them to color the squares with their crayons, but to leave some squares white.

The next day I gave them the math paper above.  They had to take their picture and tell me what the perimeter and area were, then the fractions they saw, the percentages, and then I had them glue down a slip of paper over the original fractions and simplify them.  Last we did mean, median, mode, and range.  The numbers weren't awful, but they had to know (and show) the process.  So, even though it was "work" for them, it was fun work.

Next, we did President Reports.  I did the tri-fold which included little foldables about wars and significant decisions, military service, a timeline, trivia, something unique to that president, and party/years in office/Veep.  They checked out a president biography and read/took notes for quite some time.  Then they started putting together the information.  They really enjoyed it.  I did too!  I learned new things about presidents.

Next we did an "All About Me" foldable.  I already posted about it, but I took a picture of a student's work.  I can't get any of the pics to stay upright!  lol  They are determined to hang upside down like bats.  Oh well, at least this one stayed upright.  Weird.  I still love technology, warts and all!

Vocabulary Workshop

Last Thursday I went to a workshop where the speaker was Kate Kinsella.  It was all about our ELL population and how to expand their academic vocabulary...which, in truth, ALL of our students can benefit from this instruction.  I worked with my teaching partner on Friday to create a list of words that will help our students with our first unit next year, and we decided to use the 12 powerful words for testing.  Trace, formulate, describe, analyze, infer, evaluate, support, explain, summarize, compare, contrast, predict.  We are creating sentence frames so the students can practice using them.

We'll give the word, break it into syllables, provide synonyms and/or antonyms if any, give the definition, and give two examples on how to use it.  Then we'll provide a sentence frame for the students to use.  First, they will write it down, then share with a partner.  Then they'll share with the class.  While the students are sharing whole-class, they'll have an opportunity to jot down other answers that they like.  Then they'll turn to a partner and (verbally) share the new way using the sentence frame.  Students get multiple opportunities to practice using the word with a lot of support.

After that, the students will get a second frame that will help set them up for writing.  In the first (oral) frame, the students are given the word and they have to decide how to use it.  The second sentence frame forces them to use it and provides some context to complete the sentence.  It sets them up to use it in a paragraph.  We've decided to do our first writing as a compare and contrast.

We're not allowed to share the templates, but I did recreate one because I could not open the .docx which was slightly frustrating.  Good thing I'm comfortable with the computer and recreating things!

And may I just say that coming up with sentence frames is a difficult task with some words!  I'm excited to teach vocabulary even though it will be a lot of work for the first year.  After this, we'll have all of our words.