My middle school students have really struggled with integers the last couple of years and so I've spent a lot of time trying to find activities to help them practice. One day I saw an advertisement for a game, Robbin Eggs (link provided at the bottom), in a magazine. It looked like fun, but dealt only in positive number answers. After viewing tutorials on the game, I determined it would be too easy for my students (it is recommended for ages 7+), but the idea stuck with me. I decided to make my own adjusted version of the game. I started with an empty egg carton and 18 plastic eggs: green for positive and pink for negative (I also made one with blue and yellow, the colors don't matter, as long as one is positive and one is negative). I then labeled the bottom of each egg with the following numbers: Positive: 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 15, 20 Negative: -1, -2, -3, -4, -5, -6, -7, -10 and place the eggs randomly in the carton with the number side down. I still needed a way for students to know what their goal (answer) would be and how many eggs they could turn over in pursuit of it. Since I wanted the game to be ever changing (and easy to store) I decided to use dice for this. I used a D6, a +/-, and a D16. The D6 die tells the students how many eggs to turn over, and the other two combined tell the students their goal. The game always takes a bit of explaining the first time around so we play a round together as a group. I roll the dice and demonstrate how to set up the game board by drawing lines for each egg and putting an equal sign and my goal. This helps students easily keep track of how many eggs they've turned over and remember what number they are trying to end up at. As I turn over eggs I talk through my thought process: "I need a negative number so I'll turn over a pink egg. I have -4, but -11 is further to the left on the number line so I'll turn over another pink egg. I got a -10, -10 + -4 = -14. Now I am past my goal and need to go back to the right on the number line, so I'll turn over a positive (green) egg. I got 13, 13 + -14 = -1..." As I'm talking through things, I am writing them on the board for students to see how they should be showing their work and tracking their progress. Scoring is determined by how far my final answer is from the goal. In this example, my final answer was -9, the goal was -11, that mean that I was two away from my goal. My score for the round would be 2. The ultimate goal is to have the lowest score possible. After each round all eggs are turned back over, but kept in the same spots, so students who are paying attention can remember where certain numbers are to help them in future rounds. When I have finished, I leave the example on the board for their reference. Students then play the game in groups of 2-3, taking turns and checking each other's work as they go. I circulate checking their work (which is easy because they are writing their answers below their number list as they go) and settling any disputes about the math. For students who are still new to integers, or who really struggle, I will provide them with a number line to help them do the math and figure their score. When it's time to clean up students turn all eggs over and place the dice inside the first egg. Cartons can then be closed and stacked for another day. If students play the game quite a bit it is easy to renew the board by simply moving the eggs around into new locations. My students really enjoy this game and beg to play it. I keep it on the shelf and it is one they will voluntarily go play when they have extra time after finishing something early. Some of my other integer-related products that have helped students are: |
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To core or not to core, that seems to be the big question these days. I have spent the last two years digging into the Common Core Standards, particularly the K-8 ELA standards, and my personal opinion is that they are good. I agree that they are not perfect, and there are a lot of things that seem to daunting for students, but I do believe they are an improvement over the state standards (which they were taken from) and meet a very real need for our mobile society. This post is not intended to be a commentary on the CCSS though, rather I'd like to share how one method I've learned really made a big difference for my students.
When I first heard about CER it was in a presentation about the ELA key shifts, and my first thought was that the presenter had forgotten what she wanted to say. As she continued to talk I began to realize that this "CER" was a strategy for answering questions that she used in her classroom. The more I learned about claims, evidence, reasoning, the more I liked what I heard, but I still wasn't ready to start using it in my classroom. I was forced to make the jump though when our fifth grade teacher assigned one of my low-proficiency students an essay. She was a bit confused about the process and so I made a quick graphic organizer to help her put her notes in the correct section. This made the process much easier because we could talk about her ideas, note them in the correct section, and then later she just had to write sentences from each section in order. My experience with CER was further enhanced when our PLC group decided to use it as the basis for our project the next term. We wanted students to use CER to answer their story problems in math. My students and I already spent a lot of time talking about why things work they way they do in math (I've been asked if Y is my favorite letter more than once), but having them actually write it out was a new experience. They tended to explain to me in words what they had done, leaving out any explanation of why they chose to add rather than subtract, for example. It took a lot of work and a lot of explaining, but they eventually became much better at the method, as well as story problems themselves. I even had one student tell her math teacher that she likes story problems the best now! CER has been very helpful for me and my students, and I hope it will be for yours as well. Although I must admit that it's pretty funny to hear students in the hallway saying things such as, "What's your evidence for that?", or "I disagree with your reasoning.", and then realizing their heated debate is over who is the better soccer player: Messi or Pele! I have always had a lot of ESL students whose first language did not share our Latin-based alphabet, and the best way to teach them to read, particularly the older ones, is a question I've spent a lot of time researching. I became especially interested in it when I noticed that my Arabic students in particular were struggling to make strides in their reading. The younger students did very well, but the older students (middle school and above) were just not improving at the expected rates. I am ashamed to say that part of the problem was very obvious, but did not occur to me at first. Vowels, those five important letters on which our entire language seems to hang, are not necessary to reading in Arabic; in fact many people don't even write them, it is the consonants that help you read. Once I remembered this fact, the way to help my students became obvious: they needed phonics instruction, and a lot of it. After I did some direct and explicit instruction on the importance of vowels, and how it is we change them from short to long, my students began to show greater improvements in their reading. The problem then became finding a program that taught phonics, but used reading materials interesting enough to engage my middle school learners. Unfortunately I did not find the perfect answer to this problem. I did stumble upon a phonics-based spelling program though, and used this as a jumping off point for developing my own reading scope and sequence for the year. I combed the libraries and resources of my early childhood education peers, read everything I could get my hands on relating to word families, and dove into the wonderful world of Google search results with every spare minute. The result was a phonics-based reading curriculum that, combined with a lot of explanation about why vowels are important and how they help you read better, engaged my students and resulted in amazing growth rates. This search actually became the basis of an action research project for one of my grad classes, and the paper is available below. Once I began selling my resources on Teachers Pay Teachers and other sites, my word family things were one of the first to be posted. Thankfully it has been a little over a year since I had a student who needed this level of reading instruction, but the students who were my "guinea pigs" as I developed it still talk about that year as the turn-around for them and reading. While it was developed for use with older students, it is based off the principles and methods common to the lower grades and I believe would be very successful for them as well.
My students and I have almost reached the end of testing for this year. In fact, as I type this, my seventh graders are taking their last standardized test of the year. Since we've been testing non-stop (ok, it just feels that way, but it has been a lot) since January, I am running out of quiet things to do in between pronouncing difficult words, answering their questions and fixing computer issues. Yesterday I was sitting in my chair relaxing for a moment after finishing a new set of activities for my unit on The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash, and enjoying the quiet of a hard working class, when one of my students raised his hand and asked, "Miss, could you do something teachery?" I asked him what he meant and he said, "Usually you cut, or type, or write, or do something while we test, today you are sitting. It is weird, do something teachery, it makes me feel better."
I work very hard to provide my students with a comfortable testing environment so they can do their best. I carefully choose where to sit each student, (remembering that this one likes to be by the door and placing the pencil tapper across the room from the one who struggles to focus), desks are rearranged to allow for more elbow room and free corners for oversized feet to be stuck into while nervous knees bounce up and down, signs are placed on the door reminding others to be quiet, lights are turned on or off depending on the group...and so goes the list. I always knew that my behavior and attitude played a big role in the environment and so I ensured that I was attentive, available, quiet, and relaxed, but I never really thought about the specifics of what my hands were busy doing while my brain and voice were conducting the business of testing. I thought that by sitting quietly I would be enhancing the testing environment, but my students saw it differently. It turns out they like it when I am busy with multiple tasks and find it comforting to see their teacher doing "teachery" things as they work. I ended up respondng to this request by picking up the Australia compound word puzzles (Alexander's Terrible Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day) that were only partly cut out and continuing to cut. My hand may have cramped up, but I didn't mind; if my cutting out shapes and working on lessons made taking yet another test easier in some way for my students, then I was happy to do it. I will admit though that I am very happy today is the last day of testing for this year, because while I don't mind doing quiet teacher work while they test, I'd much rather be actually teaching and leaving the rest for another time and place, such as my porch swing on a sunny July afternoon. I admit that I am not much of a baseball fan, and I am even less of a cricket fan, but my former co-teacher and current supervisor at work is a baseball fanatic. A few years ago we had to develop our own summer school curriculum for a multi-grade, multi-level ESL class. We spent many hours pondering how best to teach reading, math, and the four key skills (read, listen, write, speak) to a classroom with second through eighth graders, absolute beginners to high intermediate proficiencies, and finally decided to have theme weeks and teach a different graphic organizer with each theme. Baseball was chosen as our final theme and we decided to use a Venn diagram to do a compare and contrast unit with our students' second favorite sport: cricket.
The unit was perfect, our students were able learn a lot of new vocabulary as well as the basic rules of the great American sport, baseball, and they loved getting to be the experts and teaching their teachers about cricket. Of course it didn't hurt that I earned a lot of "so cool" comments when they discovered I already knew the basics of cricket from my time in Australia. We covered vocabulary, geography (place the team mascot in the correct state), statistics & graphing, compare & contrast writing, listening comprehension (place the players from Abbott & Costello's Who's On Frist routine in their correct positions on the field), reading comprehension (rules and basic stories), and even speaking skills! We ended the week by turning the back parking lot into our own baseball / cricket field and playing several rounds of both games (ok, we used a wiffle and tennis ball instead of the real baseball and cricket balls but we live in the city and really didn't want to break any windows). The kids had a blast and so did we. Over the years I've taken the vocabulary and other parts of that unit and used it in my classroom with smaller groups. This year I combined the vocabulary portion with our book study of Play Ball, Ameila Bedelia. The kids were already familiar with the concept of baseball from when we practiced the verb be (Am, Is, Are Triple Play) earlier this year, but still did not know the rules or a lot of the vocabulary. After learning the basics of baseball we were able to read the book and expand our idiom knowledge, laughing all the while at Amelia's silly mistakes. The kids particularly enjoyed the book because, "she know little we do" about baseball. This week I'm holding a give away promotion for my baseball vocabulary activity on Teacher's Notebook (link below). Three people will receive this activity free. There is no charge to enter (just a site membership, which is free and the weekly e-mail includes 12 free resources) but the promotion ends at midnight on June 6, so be sure to get your entry in before then. |
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May 2018
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