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| Photo by Ann Douglas downloaded from Flickr |
Last year was an "interesting" year spent teaching a new grade level while trying to find the materials and resources that would help me instruct within the Common Core State Standards framework. Google became my friend as I scoured the Web to find information, advice, and printables and thankfully people out there are very willing to share. New York decided to support modules created by Expeditionary Learning (EL) for English Language Arts and modules for Mathematics on their website Engageny.org and this year I have been exploring the use of some of the modules in both subject areas.
To be honest, at first I really disliked the modules. My reasons are not what you are probably thinking. I had no issue with the texts for the EL units and although I balked at some of the tasks my students were asked to do in the beginning of the school year, I see how my students have grown and developed since participating. My real issue was that these modules are highly scripted. So much so, that I felt that I had no real voice in my classroom anymore. Since it was my first time implementing the modules, I did not feel comfortable "putting my own stamp" on the lessons. As this year progresses, I am slowly changing this thinking.
Here is where craftiness comes to the fore. Instead of conducting teacher-directed lessons, I began to think of how we can infuse more student ownership into these lessons. I have been influenced by books such as Catching Up or Leading the Way by Yong Zhao, Creativity in the Classroom (4th edition) by Alane Jordan, and now the Passion-Driven Classroom by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold. How do I get my students to be more engaged, motivated, and learning?
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| Photo by CircumerroStock |
What would appear to be a passion for using technology "gone wild" is actually the source of my craftiness, my "lure for learning" as it would seem. My students are my fish and my use of technology is the bait. I admit this and I am not ashamed.
Some examples of Math craftiness include:
- Arranging 24 Yoga Mats- Talking a friend into manipulating reality a little in order to teach my students about creating arrays for a more concrete representation of multiplication was one of the first lures used this year. She is a yoga instructor so it was not out of the realm of possibility that she would need the help of my students to figure out how to arrange her yoga mats into equal groups if she had 24 students. (CCSS Math 3.OA.A.1; 3.OA.B.5)
- Mondrian Art- Many of students love participating in anything that is outwardly "artsy" so why not learn about a famous contemporary artist while calculating the area of squares and rectangles? (CCSS Math 3.MD.C.5)
- Kidblog for Publishing- Since the beginning of the year I have had my students use Kidblog as a place for them to digitally publish their writing. Knowing you have an audience, proved very motivating for my third-grade writers and they took more care to edit and revise for an audience. They love being able to read each other's posts and comment on them. We have read articles from Time for Kids and then written paragraphs summarizing key information. These paragraphs were posted on Kidblog for everyone to see. In September, we also used the Blogger (see our class blog) app to publish our personal narratives. (CCSS RI.3.2; RI.3.5; W.3.2; W.3.3; W.3.6)
- Aurasma Book Recommendations- After reading a book of the students' choice, they had to write a persuasive paragraph explaining why people should read their selection. We ran into some memory issues when creating our videos using the Aurasma app; however, this led to an important lesson on summarization and finding the main idea. The reviews my students had to come up with were quite concise but we still have the entire paragraph to refer back to once we work out some of the initial issues. (CCSS RL.3.2; RL.3.3; W.3.1; W.3.4; W.3.5; W.3.6)
- Northeast Travel Bureau Videos- The EL units we completed so far this year focused only on fiction texts so we have been reading informational texts at other points of the school day. Instead of telling my students were were going to develop our comprehension strategies for reading informational texts, I told them that they were in charge of collecting information about the Northeast region of the US centered on the categories of economy/natural resources, geography, climate, and culture. Lessons focused on finding main ideas and searching informational texts and then turning their information into persuasive writing pieces that would finally be turned into scripts for commercials for the "Northeast Travel Bureau." They were in charge of collaborating with peers to develop the scripts and direct themselves. If you click on the link above you will see that some groups created Google Presentations as a backdrop to their commercials (which also lent itself to a lesson on how to select images from a Google search that are earmarked as "labeled for reuse"). (CCSS RI.3.1; RI.3.2; RI.3.5; W.3.1; W.3.2; W.3.4, W.3.5; W.3.6; W.3.7; W.3.8)
