Keep the main thing the main thing

We've been working on identifying main ideas in text. That is the major reading comprehension strategy we are focused on. Today we had additional instruction on how to find it, and then how to find supporting details. What I was realizing in my instruction is that the reader needs to continually ask themselves what the author is trying to communicate.

The context for this was reading about the Age of Exploration. While it isn't a Social Studies EALR, it provides background for those first few colonies (I one or two who thought North America hadn't been invented yet). As we were reading about the astrolabe, an instrument similar to a compass, we muddled through finding main ideas. "The main idea is that it has a metal arm..." Where I was intentional in my instruction was trying to connect the heading and chapter title to the passage. After that I gave direction about where to usually look. "Authors want to tell us something, and they want their reader to know the main thing really quickly... the first 2 or 3 sentences usually."

Finding the main idea is difficult. My goal is to make them more critical readers. We want to read everything, but we also want to be strategic in what we are looking for.

Professional development and technology

I'm fortunate to be working in a district that values professional development, collaboration, and technology. Mesh those together and you have half of today's non-student day. Our learning centered around OneNote from Microsoft, essentially a digital version of a binder with assorted tabs. Using OneNote will hopefully allow for more transparency in collaboration, keep people engaged when they aren't able to meet in person, and increase productivity. How? Ideally your team would meet, talk about students and goals, and establish a to-do list for what you are going to implement in your classroom. From there you can revisit those goals and to-do's, and see where your team is with respect to meeting them. That is the ideal of course, and I'll be interested to see how that works out over the course of this year.

I also stumbled across this post on This Week In Education. It started me thinking about a statistic that I heard at today's training: if you were to use your Activeboard (or SmartBoard) during 70-80% of your instruction, and couple that with good pedagogy and best practices, then you'll increase student achievement. I forget how much, but I was more than a little surprised (and I'd also like to see who funded the study, always important). The statistic came from Marzano, so I'll try to find it.

On one hand I was excited. I have a ton of tech resources at my disposal such as computers, an activeboard, digital cameras, hi-speed internet access, a document camera, video cameras and my laptop. I need to find ways to better integrate technology into my teaching, and ensure that I am NOT letting the tech be the focus (Note: I use it daily, but not as efficiently as I could... lately using the activeboard to have kids highlight main ideas in texts was fantastic). But what I wonder is how much tech exposure kids need to have in order for technology to really have an impact? Would those schools with less technology, such as my student teaching site in Seattle, have the same result? Or would the lack of tech exposure (and the newness of it) circumvent those gains? Maybe it would simply slow the statistical benefit. All very interesting.

Record Keeping

Of all the issues that a new teacher faces, one of the biggest might be record keeping. How do you keep track of homework? How do you keep track of the quality of work? When do you find the time to do it?

Today I spent about an hour after school working on tracking homework. I had a spreadsheet previously, and it was a good start. I was looking through work, marking it in the spreadsheet, but also coarsely looking through it. I wanted to be able to informally assess the quality of work coming back, and see whether they were comprehending the assignments (all of linked into school work- building on skills, practicing etc). Going through them, I found myself almost scattered... do I look at quality? do I look at content? You look at both and you pick and choose. You find those folks that you concentrate on for one round, and then you move on... or you look for particular pieces (main ideas, supporting details etc).

After all that... I'm done for the night. Bringing too much home, and need the break between home and school.

Can we add to it?

Many great things came about today. First and foremost was success with instruction as we practiced making predictions, and linking it to evidence of some sort (ie. a picture or a word/phrase might inform you about what comes next... so adding that at the end of your prediction). After that I received my set of 3rd-5th Writer's Workshop books from Heinneman. I've been borrowing some from a 4th grade teacher, and finally was able to return hers. I dog-ear, sticky note, and continually use my teacher books so they were a must have. Lastly I received my district laptop. It is a HP, and has been imaged by the district so that they can do any maintenance if needed.

Beyond those great things was this question: "So, umm, Mr Hanson will we be able to add information to this wiki while we are in here?" Oh yes! Yes you will. My first reaction, since I am considering how I want kids to be able to edit, was that they can bring the link and the description and I will add it. So I will be interested to see what they find, if anything. Ultimately, this wiki is what I'd like to have for the kids. Even more powerful is what the Crosby class was able to do in working on the "Reno Bike Project." As a whole though, take the small victories and be ready for more work tomorrow.

Mr Hanson's Social Studies Wiki

Back when I was at UW-Bothell I decided that I was going to create a wiki for my technology class. As I was planning today, a regular Sunday afternoon occurrence, I found a great way to get my wiki up and running! Since we are going to be doing some work on natural disasters, and linking that back to the geography work we did previously, I could easily use the wiki to have kids extending their learning. The obvious upside, to me, is that I wouldn't need to send home a 5+ pound textbook!

So Mr. Hanson's Social Studies Wiki is up and running. We're going to be working on Earthquakes much of this week, so that is the furthest along. The others simply have pages and Coming Soon on them. For the natural disasters it might seem like lots of work for little use (we'll see each for about a week). On the contrary, the web research I'd already done for background information made it easy to plug in relevant information. In total it was about 30 minutes of creation, and the kids should be able to locate a variety of usable information in a central place (in particular for homework). In the future the kids will be adding to the pages, and responsible for adding new/usable information.

If only it wasn't called a wiki... my wife hates the word wiki, as it is reminiscent of the word wookie... aren't wookies cute though?

Where social studies and literacy meet

This week we are making a transition from the social studies text to the basal reader. The goal is to intentionally integrate the basal into our social studies block, and primarily focus on reading comprehension skills. While I think I can integrate those skills into the social studies text, I've struggled getting that going. Why? Largely because of the content we've been reading. The first section was laden with vocabulary, setting the stage for the chapters to come. Instead of thinking about reasons for migration, or tensions between colonies (etc), we were developing geography skills.

You might wonder where we're going next... We are going to launch the reader with the theme "Nature's Fury." The focus is on nature's impact on humans, using realistic fiction as the vehicle moving kids along. How I will mesh geography into this is through adding some articles on earthquakes (the first selection), and using our knowledge of maps to identify where earthquake faults are and how that relates to where people are located (we have started using population density maps a bit). We'll be working on predicting/inferring, as well as sequencing. I have high hopes...

On another note, I'm still in the beginning stages of getting a blog up and running for the classroom. But I do have designs on some wiki work- collaborative research, as well as some podcasting. It will all come together... hopefully sooner rather than later.

Summarize This! (redux)

Oh how things can go wrong in an instant. The first rotation (of 3) went sideways very quickly. I spent too much time finishing a reading comprehension sheet from the day before, and reviewing whole group (with kids talking in groups to confirm their responses- since all had read the piece, and most were 3/4 done or further). The initial time had the kiddos sitting too long, and I ended up doing too much talking thereafter as I was modeling how to summarize.

Do they know how to summarize? Well they have been asked to summarize before, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they all know how to summarize. My goal was to be intentional in my modeling, engage then engage them through helping me put the parts of my summary together, and release them into independent practice on a chapter summary. Oy vey!

After talking too long the kids seemed lethargic. Most wrote a few sentences, but many were leading with supporting details and tossing in the kitchen sink. While we had talked (student-generated) about a summary being "only the main ideas, and details to support them," there were plenty of summaries that had gone askew.

How do I fix it? Well by providing more scaffolding this first time around. Some will need an in-between step from notes to summary. They will need an organizational tool/framework that will then allow them to move more seamlessly into writing. In this case, I will have a few photocopied for those that struggle transferring board-paper. Otherwise I will have the structure in Word on the projector (or in a flipchart), and they can copy that onto notebook paper (save some copies) and staple that to go with their summary. Additionally I am going to have them peer review their summaries- does it include a topic sentence? does it have supporting details? are the main ideas from the chapter included? is the writing clear to the reader? We'll see if this helps us along.