I am writing about the lesson from Day 3 of the Extreme Sports Unit, mainly
because I finished teaching it to all four classes on Friday and it is fresh on
my mind!
In this lesson I had the students review vocabulary
words from the two previous lessons, listen to a read aloud of two non fiction articles
on extreme sports, and then they worked in pairs to answer comprehension
questions about the articles.
For the pre assessment or warm up, the students were
told to take out a piece of paper and pen or pencil and to take out their cell
phones. The assignment was posted on Google Classroom. On September 8th
all of the students will be given their own tablet to take to school/home,
after tablet roll out assignments will be on Google classroom on the screens of
their tablet, as well as on my smartboard, and they won’t use paper, instead
they will type the answers into their tablet and send it to me on Google Drive.
Meanwhile, paper…
I assigned words that had been used during the
previous lessons and needed to be reviewed. I really want to focus more on
vocabulary this year. They were told to use their cell phones to look up the 10
words listed on Dictionary.com or Google it and write down the definition that
most fit what they knew of the word already. If they didn’t have a cell, or a
partner with a cell (this was pair work), they were to write down the
definitions in their own words (and I’ll be nice when grading because it’s not
fair that they didn’t have the internet as a resource). This assignment took a
little longer than I thought it would. But it was effective. I circulated to
make sure everyone was on task. These classes are still new to me and I needed
to see who was working and who was not and why. By and large everyone in all
four classes seemed to actually like the assignment, I think because of the
technology aspect and they were able to work in pairs.
Then I moved on and handed out a packet of two
different articles on extreme sports. One article holds the point of view that
extreme sports is good, the other says it is dangerous and you should be
cautious. This will help us to move towards finding the author’s claim, author
bias, ethos, pathos, and logos and using evidence to support your claim using
in text citation. But for this lesson I started out slow. I let them know that
I would be doing a read aloud of both articles and their job was to remain
quiet and follow along. Today would be the first reading, I told them we’d go
over the articles more in depth with each day.
I was planning on having them go more in depth with
annotation, having them take out high lighters and figuring out claims and
evidence, but during the first class I asked the students if they’d heard of
annotation before (I wrote the word on the board). They all gave me blank
looks. “Whut?”was the general consensus. In one of the classes many of them
raised their hand and said they’d heard of annotation and had used the
technique before in a previous class, but all of the other classes were
clueless- never heard of it before. So I realized I needed to dial it down and
start small and add more annotation to the lesson on Day 4. I taught them how
to write a note to themselves next to the title of each article about the point
of view of the author. Their first annotation!
After the read alouds I assigned post assessment
comprehension questions they could work on in pairs. These were higher level
questions that had to be answered in complete sentences. I showed them how they
could answer questions one and three using the annotation they placed at the
top of each article, turning their note into a complete sentence. This linked
the value of annotation to their work. They had to compare and contrast the two
articles and also I turned the titles of the two articles into questions to be
answered. I circulated and could tell that the questions were challenging for
them so I spent time coaching them individually. Just the right amount of
challenging though - good learning!
At the end of each 90 min block there was always about
ten minutes left and I used that time for turning in work and having the
closure of showing a 5 min. video I found from CBS Sunday Morning about a
couple who met and married because of their mutual love for extreme sports. It
was darling, the students always clapped at the end. J
Smarty! Your experience had you automatically doing a pre-assessment during class on annotation! And, you learned and you proceeded accordingly. When teachers begin their careers, they rarely ask students what they know or can do. You do...and, my lesson is over. Loved your close of class! You do not even need a post-assessment, but your students do! They need to be reminded of what they learned about Xtreme Sports. Perhaps you could start with that question in tomorrow's class. Thank you...applause!
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