Friday Fun Archive Students worked hard all week? Do they deserve a special reward for a job well done? The lesson and project ideas below are meant to fill the bill for Friday afternoon fun and learning. Some are simple games or activities that will reinforce skills as they offer a nice break from structured learning. Others are project ideas to be completed over multiple Friday afternoons. Click a link below to explore any idea in more detail. Profile Posters Learn about students' interests from the "profile posters" they create. Charting a Year of Growth Older students and younger buddies team up for yearlong fun. A Week in the Life of A yearlong project creates a great end-of-year memento. Getting-to-Know-You Venn Diagram Students discover common interests and unique abilities. Chain Gang A colorful chain promotes teamwork all year long. The Alphabet Game Use this lively, team-based game to reinforce spelling skills. Pop Up a Card This art activity offers monstrous Halloween fun. Who Works at Our School?
46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Infographics are interesting–a mash of (hopefully) easily-consumed visuals (so, symbols, shapes, and images) and added relevant character-based data (so, numbers, words, and brief sentences). The learning application for them is clear, with many academic standards–including the Common Core standards–requiring teachers to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency. It’s curious they haven’t really “caught on” in schools considering how well they bridge both the old-form textbook habit of cramming tons of information into a small space, while also neatly overlapping with the dynamic and digital world. So if you want to try to make infographics–or better yet have students make them–where do you start? The 46 tools below, curated by Faisal Khan, are a good place to start.
SMART Teaching Strategies Sentences are key units for expressing ideas. Students in Stage 1 are using sentence structure in their writing to compose longer texts that achieve the intended purpose. Students at this stage need to use compound and some complex sentences for expressing connected and elaborated ideas in writing. Strategy Explicit Teaching There are different types of sentences: simple, compound and complex: Simple sentences are structured by a single main clause. Students in Stage 1 need to write accurate simple and compound sentences and learn to recognise and compose some complex sentences. Introduce students to complex sentence structure. General Strategies Engage students with frequent experiences of hearing, reading and viewing texts with a variety of sentence structures. Teach students how to join sentences using different conjunctions for different purposes (for example and, but, because). Activities to support the strategy Activity 1 Sentences can grow! Activity 2 Conjunctions Bank Online resources
NAPLAN 2010 Teaching Strategies NAPLAN 2010 Teaching Strategies Linking NAPLAN 2010 to the Curriculum The teaching strategies in this site provide support to teachers and enable explicit links from the assessment to the curriculum. The website is divided into Numeracy and Literacy. The strategies in Numeracy are categorised by strand and substrand. Browser compatibilities This site is compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and above, Firefox 3 and above, and Safari 4 and above. Reporting problems To report broken links or any other functional problem in the site, please send an email to naplan@det.nsw.edu.au. Site content as pdf Each teaching strategy has the option of "print as pdf" by clicking this icon on the teaching strategy pages: For each strategy, this button accesses a pdf of all the teaching strategies for the particular strand. To download the numeracy or literacy sections of this site in their entirety in pdf form, refer here
Why some kids can’t spell and why spelling tests won’t help A couple of years ago, early one morning, I received an SMS advising “resadents to stay indoors because of a nearby insadent”. I was shocked by the spelling, as much as the message. Surely, I thought, if it was a real message then the spelling would be correct. Spelling matters. In a text message from a friend teeing up a night out “c u at 8” is fine - but in an emergency warning text from a government agency, I expect the spelling to be standard. But why is it that some people struggle with standard spelling? Spelling remains the most relentlessly tested of all the literacy skills, but it is the least taught. Sending a list of words home on Monday to be tested on Friday is not teaching. Looking, covering, writing and checking does not teach spelling. And yet, this is a good summary of most of the current spelling programs in schools today. So, what should spelling teaching look like? Finding meaning That is not only very very hard, it’s pointless. More than sounds Where words come from
Schools need advice on how to help students with reading difficulties As students prepare to go back to school, it’s estimated that between 10% to 16% of those aged from five to 16 years will have reading difficulties such as dyslexia and inadequate comprehension skills. All teaching makes particular assumptions about how students tend to learn. For these students, regular literacy teaching will be insufficient. They need alternative teaching pathways. Despite numerous policies, such as the Literacy and Numeracy National Partnership, and the A$706.3 million spent between 2008-2014 on reading programs to support students, literacy underachievement continues to plague Australian education, suggesting that current interventions are not working for all students. Teachers don’t necessarily know how to teach these children. The problem is not a lack of research about what works. School leaders are responsible for making definitive decisions about educational provision in their schools. Why do some students struggle with reading? What’s needed
Why is English so hard to learn? The prime minister, David Cameron, wants more Muslim women in the UK to be taught English to reduce segregation between different linguistic communities and even limit the lure of extremism. Most of us who have tried it probably feel that learning a new language is difficult, even if that new language is similar to our own. So how difficult is it to learn English and especially if your first language is quite different? The difficulty of learning a new language will depend on how similar that language is to one you already know. Despite English speakers often rating certain languages as being particularly difficult – languages such as French, which indicate the gender of nouns with articles like le and la, and the Chinese writing system – there are similarities between these languages. If you were to learn French you’d immediately recognise many words, because the English equivalents have French Latin roots, such as ballet or amiable. Baffling spellings Being polite
What Are Modifiers? A modifier is a word, phrase, or clause which functions as an adjective or an adverb to describe a word or make its meaning more specific. Modifiers can play the roles of adjectives or adverbs. Modifiers As Adjectives When a modifier is an adjective, it modifies a noun or a pronoun. Lee caught a small mackerel. When a modifier is an adverb, it modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Lee accidentally caught a small whelk. Read more about adjective phrases.Read more about adjective clauses.Read more about adverbial clauses.Read more about adjective phrases.
Literably Is An Excellent Reading Site — If Used With Caution Reader Erika Chapman tipped me off to an excellent site called Literably. It allows students to read a text and have it automatically assessed for accuracy and words-per-minute speed. Plus, and this is what was most surprising to me, it also provides a fairly accurate indentification of student errors — in other words, what word they said instead of the word in the text. You’re able to provide the student or parent a link to the recording. It’s extraordinarily easy to use. As I have already mentioned, the site seems remarkably accurate based on my testing, and I’ll have my students try it out later today. I’ve previously posted about how I have had students record their reading of the same text several times during the year as a self-assessment, using tools from The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English list. And, now, for my cautions…. A words per minute number can be dangerous if students are just racing through the words. I’m adding Literably to several “The Best” lists, including: