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Sunday, March 11, 2012
Strategies and Testing
I will go ahead and start off this blog with the fact that I am horribly slow and have just acquired my copy of Readacide and have begun reading it...yeah, it's not like that took forever. So I am double timing what I have learned so far and will be working on "catching up." But I'd like to focus on something that I found a connection to in the classroom recently. This past week, I was required to give a pre-test for my students and according to my TWS it had to be between 10-15 multiple choice questions.
I shuddered at the instructions and come to find out, my students did as well.
I personally loathe MC tests because of the fact that there is only ONE right answer out of four. I am a very verbal person and love to explain things. I like to give my reasons of why something is right or wrong and have it graded upon my textual evidence. In other words, I like short answers. And while my seventh graders loved the shorter tests and no writing involvement, their attitude quickly changed when they discovered how poorly they did on the MC tests. They wanted to revert back to writing immediately.
Just thought that it was interesting that the first chapter in Readacide accurately reflected my students in the classroom.
As for this week, it's been the week of strategies. It's been rather difficult for my own unit plan to be implemented this week because of the undegrad senior ELA student teacher who had to teach HER unit plan this week. Not that it's a bad thing that she is teaching, but it was very difficult for TWO ELA teachers to implement lesson plans in the same week and the same time frame. So we collaborated and needless to say, we both got our jobs done.
I introduced my students this week to the ideas of character sketches and graphic organizers. They loved the idea! But the thing I was the most impressed that the students caught onto was the Cornell Note Taking method we learned recently in class. When I told the students that they would be using "short hand" to take notes, I saw their eyes light up. They loved the idea of the bullet points and the chart. It actually had them closely paying attention to their text and I had more questions than I had ever had before about vocabulary, scenes, and dialogue in our book. I was very impressed at the success level of the chart.
Has anyone else tried this method next? I'm thinking next week we are going to implement "mini" word walls that the students can take with them. Kind of like little tri-fold pocket word walls (saw the idea on someone else's blog) because the students need something to help with their vocabulary words.
Any ideas of what strategies work best with this and vocabulary word walls in general? Also, I seem to be running out of ideas for strategies, haha! What books should I turn to next?! Could be that I am just running on empty with only 56 days left of grad school...
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I need to try the Cornell not taking so badly now that you mention it! I'm glad you tried it because I am definitely in need of some note taking strategies for my kids. I didn't realize how many notes they have to take...or not that many notes...but how much time it takes for them to take their notes! I try to make them short sometimes and out teacher does a lot of fill-in notes sheets, but we run out of copies a lot because we only get a certain amount. The thing about my students taking their own notes is that they don't spell well or read well so they copy things wrong and go so fast they will write wrong words entirely or just skip words, so that is where we run into trouble. Let me know if you have any of those troubles because my kids plus notes can equal a disaster if I let them off on their own.
ReplyDeletewhen using word wall minis, or just word walls in general, try to connect the words to something you are reading at the time or to the students themselves (a combination of words they think are interesting or strange, words that relate to the content, and words they feel connect to their culture/ interests is best). Ask them what words they have heard but don't know what they mean, give them options of choosing words you pick out, let them look through dictionaries and fiction and nonfiction on a variety of subjects for a few minutes and tell them to find as many words they don't know in five minutes or less and write them down. If they have trouble writing them down then give them copies you don't care much about and have them circle these words in pencil or highlight them. Make it into a game. Make it fun. Let them illustrate/ color these words, redefine them in their own words, and provide a sentence for each, then present a word each to the class. Keep the words to a minimum so they aren't overwhelmed-- think about 5-10 depending on how much time they have to learn them and their abilities.
DeleteJust a few suggestions. I used the word wall with my kids and they loved it! They colored them, wrote definitions, learned the real definitions, and created examples.
Just make sure the students are able to attach suffixes correctly to show the correct cases--this was harder for my students to grasp b/c their vocab workbooks don't do a good job of it:)