I decided I was going to start showing my 7th graders how to do this. I made this handout for them and explained that we were going to practice how to study today. I told them that these strategies will apply to other classes and will be extra useful for high school. One of my students exclaimed "This is so helpful! All teachers should do this! I never know how to study!" I felt immediately satisfied that this was a necessary lesson. __________________________________________________
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find activities that are just right for our novice learners. I hope this compilation of cartoons, videos, and comprehensible passages helps you save time!
With Edpuzzle you can crop videos to only show the most relevant section and then embed questions for students to answer throughout!
Let me back up and provide some background. This year I am teaching a class comprised of 7th and 8th grade students called Spanish Seminar. The class is a bit of a hodge-podge of students who speak Spanish as their first language and some who have had Spanish since Kindergarden, but don't speak it at home. It's the first time we've had enough kids to run a class like this, and so we have no real curriculum. I have really been flying be the seat of my pants - borrowing from both the ELA standards and looking at the high school's curriculum to try to best meet everyone's unique needs. On top of everything, the group dynamic of the class has been really lack-luster. They are hands-down the shyest class of students I have ever taught, and I find myself begging them to talk and share their thoughts! But today something magical happened!
A big goal for me this year was to add more cultural lessons into my classroom. I started by purchasing Sra. Cruz's amazing Cultura Diaria - Daily Hispanic Culture Facts for Each Day of Spanish Class as my daily bell-ringer for my 6th graders. I made them a supplemental note-taking packet to go with it, and each week we look at a different country. Over the course of the week, they __________________________________________________
__________________________________________________me because kids feel safer when they know what to expect! Here are 5 things we do every day. __________________________________________________sense, but you'd be surprised how often these suggestions are overlooked. _________________________________________________This year we were asked to adopt the idea of Growth Mindset, an idea from Carol Dweck, an author and leading researcher in the field of motivation. The main idea behind growth mindset is that we don't have a fixed intelligence and we can all get better at something if we put in enough work. (I'm trying to get better at blogging and marketing right now!!😉 )This was presented to us during a staff meeting and coupled with the idea of grading. Some of my coworkers and I started talking after the meeting "Does this mean we have to allow unlimited retakes? Won't kids just choose not to study so they can see what's on the test and then ask to do a retake?" There's a lot of sticky questions to navigate, but I thought I'd give it a try in a small way. __________________________________________________
During my student teaching, I remember observing veteran teachers and thinking "Wow, they speak so much English! I'll never do that!" Fast forward 10 years and....We're all guilty of it. Sometimes it's just faster and easier to give the directions in English, even if we know we need to be speaking in Spanish. Here are three tools I use in the classroom that have really helped both the kids and I to speak more Spanish.
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I have a divider in it for each different prep, and I transfer whatever current unit I’m working on for each class to that binder to easily transport back and forth as necessary.
I also add a footer to each document I create with the file name. That way, when I catch mistakes I’ve made, I can easily find the file on my computer to modify it for next time. This was helpful when my school switched from Word to Google Docs, and I couldn’t remember where I made the document: .doc for Word and .gdoc for Google Docs. How do you stay organized? The next day I told students I would set a timer for 5 minutes. In those 5 minutes they could use their notes and ask each other for help, but I would not answer any questions. At first, they all panicked and wanted help. I stayed strong and just pointed to the clock. And – miracle of miracles! – they started to read the directions and ask each other for help!!! By the time the buzzer went off, there were only a few questions and they were actually curricular-related as opposed to I-don’t-feel-like-reading-the-directions-myself questions. At the end of class, I made sure to praise my students for working so independently and point out that they just needed a few minutes to allow themselves to think on their own. I think something may have clicked! What tricks do you use to help kids become more independent and read directions? __________________________________________________bag they came from. To solve this problem, I have begun numbering the pieces on the back. ___________________________________________________
Then we do one of their favorite activities all year: Pronoun TPR. Here's a video demo. ______________________________________ |