Writing, Reading, and Oral Communication explorations

Writing

This is a post from a lesson done a number of weeks ago at Nelson Mandela.  Ms. Owen's 5/6 class embarked on a narrative writing project.  To start things off, we listened to a copy of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and aimed to match parts of the text with some of the traditional portions of a narrative framework.

The annotations on the photocopied pages from the book were an attempt to have the students interact with book and develop some reading strategies.  actual photocopies of the

Eventually, Ms. Owen placed the definitions up on the wall in the typical plot line that students off see:

The Success Criteria for the assignment was posted on the class Google Classroom page but we (Ms. Owen and I) decided to make this more visible for the students:

One of the problems, though, with narrative writing is the great potential for it to become overwhelming for the student if it is not contained properly.  I read a number of the drafts of what the students did and they seemed to veer off the plotline with too many details that do not relate to the key components of a narrative or the criteria outlined on the Success Criteria chart.

I will check in with the Teacher in the new year to see how she felt about the final copies handed in by the Students.  I am going to spend some time thinking about a more efficient and engaging way to look at this genre of Writing.

Round Table:  Reading and Oral Communication

This post was written with one Round Table exercise complete and three classes in the middle of completing another one relating to Masculinity, Boyhood, and Gender.

In Ms. Jimenez's class at Queen Victoria, we used the following news item as our "text" to study.  It is also important to note that this topic to be explored came from the class; in other words, it was of interest and relevance to them.

The original article was from here.  

The following questions are meant to be guiding questions for the class.  By no means is the discussion limited to the information related to these questions, but they help get the discussion going.

When students are having some difficulties talking in the circle or coming up with ideas, the following prompts are available:

The two large slides are from TDSB lessons relating to the Round Table exercise.  I am not sure who the original authors are.

This will be explored more in the new year (2020).
Enjoy the rest of 2019 and have a superb start to 2020.

Math, Talking Relationships & Trauma-Informed Teaching (Teacher PD)

Mathematics

The Math project I previously blogged about will probably be completed and posted on the wall when I return to Nelson Mandela PS.  Here is a photo of a designer in action and an image of a completed project (done by Ms. Baker's students in a previous year).

the planning continued

some finished products

Talking Relationships/Community Building in Grade 6

This particular unit was developed for Grade 7 & 8 students and I used this two years ago with my Grade7/8 class at Dovercourt.  It was developed by the Gender-Based Violence Prevention Office at the TDSB.   In an attempt to develop a stronger community of students in Grade 6 at Nelson Mandela, Paula Quintana (my SSTC colleague) and I have been doing a series of lessons and having the students develop some understanding of who they are and some of the dynamics which go into developing healthy relationships. 

Here are a series of photos detailing some of our explorations so far:

The aim of all lessons is to create a safe space for all learners to share and feel comfortable.  These are some of the norms we created as a class

Ms. Q's Circles of Myself identity exercise

Mr. P's Circles of Myself 

This lesson had the students define was they thought were particular behaviours you might see in a Healthy, Unhealthy relationship and the warning behaviours you would want to look for. 

In these two photos, the students made a list of activities they enjoyed doing.  One of the goals of this exercise was to have the students identify how these activities made them feel positive and, when possible, to engage in them.  The students then categorized them into categories outlined in the Talking Relationships book.  

 Trauma-Informed Pedagogy (grounded in Trauma-Informed Practice)

Trauma-Informed Practice is a strengths-based framework grounded in an understanding of and responsiveness to the impact of trauma, that emphasizes physical, psychological, and emotional safety for everyone, and that creates opportunities for survivors to rebuild a sense of control and empowerment (Hopper et al., 2010).  Source

This was a workshop led by the Psychologist who works at Ryerson PS.  I am posting the images here as an exercise in self-reflection.  I had heard of this workshop before and missed it and capture some key points in the following photos.  

This last slide was something I found on LinkedIn

I believe these items should inform how our classrooms look and sound. 

Wisdom from Ms. Owen's 5/6 classroom

Mid December Reflections: Learning from my Colleagues

With the exercise of blogging, you often tell yourself that you will do it on a consistent basis.  That has not happened and a lot of it has to do with my Teaching being on the road and not having a classroom to set myself up in.

There have been countless opportunities to Teach, observe, and Learn from the colleagues I work with and the students I see at Queen Victoria PS and Nelson Mandela Public School.  I feel honoured to be in this role, even though I often stumble through when I explain my role to people who ask what I do.  To be honest, though, I am stumbling a lot less these days and take that as a positive sign.

Numeracy

This will be a topic of another post, as I do more reading and reflecting on the paradox of students learning or not learning how to multiply.  Alan Malolos, a former K-12 Coach and I were looking at the multiple ways students might approach doing a Multiplication question.

For a number of students, they see Math as an operation of repeated addition:

When I begin to dissect some of the confusion around multiplication and really think about it, we should be able to offer our students multiple entry points for understanding.  

This assumes that the students have an understanding of Place Value.  If we want to get technical, this has to do with understanding the Distributive Principal of multiplying. 

To quote the Nelson Education Math assessment, Leaps and Bounds, this principle means "that to multiply a x b, you can multiply a by the parts of b and add the products."

But what if you are having problems knowing that six times six is thirty-six?  This is a good question that needs to be explored.  I learned that 6 x 6 was 36 from memory and did not explore how a group of 6 could be added six times to get 36 or I could learn how to skip count, 6 times, to arrive at 36.  

Beyond simply memorizing the tables, we are hoping that students will develop an appreciation of the way Multiplication has a particular framework.  I have been guilty of rushing in and suggesting particular approaches for solving questions but I am not quite sure the students grasp what they are doing, even though they may get the answer correct.  

This is another approach using the Distributive Principle.  I don't think it needs to be capitalized but it seems important enough that is should be.

Patterning

In this role, I am lucky to visit so many different classrooms and see a lot of exciting Teaching that offers up students multiple entry points to understand different topics.  In a classroom I visited at Queen Victoria PS, I saw a teacher showing students how they could build models, with cubes, based on patterns they were investigating.

I really wish I took more photos and documented more students learning but I was able to snap a few photos.

I think the lesson began with Ms. Scott asking her class to build an example of a growing pattern, using the block provided.  Two students came up to model what they built and she then proceeded to create a table recording the patterns.

In this case, the pattern rule was n to the power of two or "start at 1 and square each time"

There were many other cool designs I got to see and these are only a fraction of them.  I will make a deliberate and determined effort to circulate around the class more to capture the Learning.  

Measurement

My final example for today looks at this really innovative, project-based approach to consolidating learning with some aspects of the Grade 8 Measurement strand.  Ms. Baker (Nelson Mandela PS) gave the students the freedom to design a park that had to fall within a particular perimeter.  She wanted the students to demonstrate their understanding of the Circumference of Circle, the ability to apply the Pythagorean Theorem in their design.  It is probably better just to show a couple of images of the final copies being worked on.  I will be sure to post some additional photos, once they are done or in the process of being completed.

I am thoroughly enjoying the learning I am taking away from the colleagues I have met this year.  Thanks.

JETS: Joy, Empathy, Thinking, Strategies

As a Student Success Teacher, I am afforded a lot of opportunities to take in some really excellent Professional Development (PD).  One of the visits that really stood out for me was being in a classroom and seeing the JETS approach to delivering Writing and Reading in high school English classes.

I was able to visit both JETS oriented classrooms created by the co-founders Rachel Cooke of Silverthorn CI  and Sean Henderson of Runnymede CI.

Sean Henderson

Rachel Cooke (holding plaque) 

Rather than being too wordy, I will add a short selection of photos and briefly explain why I think this approach to teaching English/Language is pretty cool and something I will use, once I return to having my own classroom.

Photo 1:

Typically, students get overly enthusiastic about highlighting a text and sometimes do it without fulling understanding what is on the page.  Some of the approaches in the JETS classroom have the students ask questions, make comments, or observations about the paragraphs, words, or sentences they may be reading and recording them as short annotations in the margins.  Yes, a highlighter can be used but this approach to reading has the students being more engaged with the words on the page.

Photo 2

I am pretty certain this photo comes from the New York Times exercise for developing inferencing skills.  I used to have the students record observations and tap into their own experiences to explain what might be happening.  The JETs approach has the students annotate on the photo, as you can see in this example.

Although I did not take the photo of the next stage of this exercise, a student went to the board to write out the inferences they made.  It was a deliberate combination of Reading and Writing for this learning opportunity.

Photo 3

One of the strategies we often tell students to do is visualize, while they read, to help deepen their comprehension.  On this handout, the students are actually tasked with sketching the visualization.

Photo 3

This appears to be an assessment of some of the Reading Strategies that Sean used in his JETs class at Runnymede.

I did have some photos from Rachel Cooke's class but I am not sure where I stored them.  I do have one handout which was a form of an assessment based on work they have done on Graphic Novels.

In the JETs program, Graphic Novels are seen as excellent starting points for introducing students to Reading strategies in high school.

Enjoy the balance of your weekend and start to the next work week.

Diverse Voices of Climate Change activism

photo courtesy of hyperlink

I am so hyped by the enthusiasm and passion displayed by Greta Thunberg but there are other voices out there that can be overlooked.  CNN has profiled some of these young activists on their page.

I think it is important to listen to Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory's Autumn Peltier.  

Recaps from 2018-2019: Student Parliament/Student Voice @ Ryerson PS

Before I begin, if you don't already know, I enjoy taking photos with my phone and those shots may end up in a post.

One of the key things in the role of being a Student Success Teacher rests with the abilities to connect with students and have them engaged with their learning.  Key to this is having them talk and make sense of things.

At Ryerson PS, one of the first learning experiences I had was with a group of Grade 8 students who were preparing for speeches for the Student Parliament elections. 

I can't quite remember all of the details of the lesson but I remember playing a game, as a mind-on exercise to activate some ideas around Speeches and then spent some time looking at samples of Speeches from YouTube.  As they did this, they had this placemat to jot down their observations. 

It is not my intention to post all of the videos we looked at but here is one that really stood out.
It became an example of what we should avoid doing.

I know that my colleague at Ryerson will be assisting with the Student Parliament speeches this year and will be using Greta's Thunberg's powerful speech as an example of what could be done to fashion a powerful and engaging speech.

As a class, we went through the placemats and each group was able to generate what they thought were the most important aspects for writing and delivering a speech.  The goal in mind was to develop a Success Criteria chart to help guide the students. 

On one side, were the rough notes after our discussions and debriefing and then the final chart, in its polished form.

As I skim through some photos from last year, I will come across another lesson that I feel is worthy of sharing and engaging with.  This process also serves as a reminder of what  I need to remember, when supporting students the students I do.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.