A school in Vancouver has been using apps during centre time in the primary classrooms. I tried a few with my six year old daughter and have some mixed feelings. What do you think? Check out the link for the apps they use.
Posted in Uncategorized
If you got a notification from this blog yesterday (click here) and were curious to why it seemed to be rather sparse, please bear with me- I’m learning to blog.
The link I attached shared some ideas on how to engage boys with reading. I have to admit that reading over the list of characteristics of boys as readers, reminded me of who I was as a young male reader.
I was fortunate to have had parents that had a deep love of reading and encouraged me as a youngster to read whatever texts I found interesting- comic books, Sports Illustrated, Choose Your Own Adventure, Asterix, Tintin, etc. In my high-school years, I began to read lots of Stephen King and biographies on famous sports athletes. (I now realize that I seem to fit the profile of a male reader 
).
Though I was a passionate reader, I was not an overly engaged as a student in grades 8 and 9. You would have found me sitting in class reading my own novel, rather than the prescribed one, or spinning my basketball. I was certainly not the teacher’s pet!
In grade 11, however, my English teacher recognized my passion for reading and eventually helped me realize that I was a capable English student. This changed everything for me. If it was not for her, I doubt I would have become an English teacher.
My reading interests evolved over the years. I moved from reading Stephen King horror novels to reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and other Victorian novels. My appreciation for literature became more mature. I might enjoy a character in one novel, the use of imagery in another, or another for its peek into a particular moment in time. There was always something in a novel that I could appreciate.
So, I suppose, in my musings here, I feel fortunate to have had such wonderful parents and for the teachers who were able to recognize the young-male reader that lay beneath my sometimes intellectually disengaged appearance.
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Secondary school based learning teams will provide an opportunity for teachers to engage in an inquiry around student engagement. Teams (6 – 8 members) may be cross curricular or subject based. Each learning team member will receive Karen Hume’s professional resource “Tuned Out, Engaging the 21st Century Learner”. The learning teams will meet five times throughout the year.
Leading and Teaching for Mindful Self-regulated Learning
In this summer institute, Susan Close will focus on how to use SmartLearning to develop mindful, self-regulated learners — learners equipped with the higher order skills needed to thrive in a fast-paced, everchanging world.
Registration information available at: http://www.smartreading.ca/
The Awards Ceremony for the 25th Annual Words Writing Project was held at Michael J Fox Theatre on Thursday, June 2. This year’s Anthology features a collection of 81 works by writers from kindergarten to grade 12 in French and English. They were chosen from more than 700 elementary and secondary school entries. Congratulations to all student writers!
What the research says / What I have observed in my classes:
Strategies / Structures that worked:
1. Provide opportunities that allow boys to achieve a sense of competence
2. Expect boys to complete tasks that are neither too easy, nor too difficult
3. Provide clear goals and immediate feedback
4. Create mentorship opportunities with males as role models
5. Value texts of all genres and allow boys to choose what they read / how they demonstrate understanding
6. Be aware of, and attend to, boys’ learning styles
Resources:
Boy Smarts: Mentoring Boys for Success at School
Barry MacDonald
Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men Jeffrey Wilhelm
Going With the Flow: How to Engage Boys (and Girls) in Their Literacy Learning
Jeffrey Wilhelm
Creating a Literacy Environment for Boys
Christopher Spence
Literature Circles develop student enthusiasm for reading. Language Arts’ teachers, embracing the idea of choice and recognizing the need to differentiate have been using literature circles for the past several years. Letting students choose books could make them better readers, an article from the Globe and Mail, confirms the idea that providing choice to students will, in fact, create readers!
Posted in News
Tagged choice, differentiation, engagement, literature circles, reading
“School improvement expert Bob Marzano asks, “Why would anyone want to change current grading practices? The answer is quite simple: grades are so imprecise that they are almost meaningless.” It is for that reason that makes me believe Ken O’Connor’s professional resource, “A Repair Kit for Broken Grading – 15 Fixes for Broken Grades” should be in staffrooms and/or teacher prep rooms in every school in our district. One idea that O’Connor explores in the first chapter of the book was around allowing new evidence to replace old evidence when it’s clear that a student knows or can do something today that he/she didn’t or couldn’t previously. How many times did I average a student’s scores even though it was clear that the student had eventually mastered concepts that he had previously struggled with? How accurate was the grade that student received? In order for marks to be authentic, they must reflect what a student is able to do.
While the idea seems logical, I’m wondering what this might look like in our classroom practice. In other words, how do we manage our mark books to ensure they reflect what our students are able to do?
Questions to consider:
What do you wonder about?
What do you worry about?
What do you want to get better at?
What do you want to try?
If ________________________________________________
Then _____________________________________________
We know we’ve changed by _____________________________
mathotj
pareb