China – Teaching Day 3

_Please excuse some of the writing. I’m trying to post as much as possible, but I’m writing in small chunks. I also write in Markdown and my WordPress editor isn’t converting that back to html right now. Thus, you may see odd marks in certain places. I’m also incredibly tired at this point. I may go back at some point and correct grammar and structure, but I think that it is more important to share what is happening._

The large group instruction began with recognizing two students from each homeroom with a trinket. There was lots of applause and praise.

One of the American teachers shared their story of why she is a teacher.

The ice breaker was the shoe in the middle activity. Thirty students were selected to form a circle. They threw one shoe in the middle of the circle. They then have 2 seconds to grab a shoe. Once they grab a shoe and return to the circle, they have to find the owner of the shoe. Once they find the owner, they interview the owner to learn about them. The teachers had a terrific time completing the activity.

A Myth/Legend was shared. Today was “Jason and the Argonauts”. The story was projected onto a very large screen and read by one of the American teachers. The teachers then followed directions to create a life jacket that retells the story.

Music in the classroom was next. The lesson revolved around Walking on Sunshine by Christina and the Waves. An action was associated with a couple of different terms. The teachers acted this out. Then the tie in with Multiple Intelligences was made. Next we reviewed the song from the previous day.

Off to Homeroom.

I started out with a bad joke. “What did Snow White say when her photos did not come back from the lab?”. I had to review the idea of having pictures printed (not a cultural issue, but a generational one). Then I shared the punchline with them – “She said, ‘That’s OK. Some day my prints will come'”. On the board I wrote out the punchline with (prince) underneath the word prints. Then I explained that many jokes in English work because of words that sound the same. I had the teachers complete two Frayer Models using the words prints and prince. This was to practice the skills from last night.

Next we had the teachers employ a Box and Summarize strategy with a piece of text that is in their book. The teachers read the material and boxed each paragraph. Next each table of students were assigned a specific section of the text. They were to become the “experts” of that section. The experts would then go off to the other tables to be the envoys of that section. The tables selected their four experts per table (and the three who would go to other tables). After time to process, the teachers mixed into the tables appropriately. This is one assignment that reminded me of the power of collaboration. As I originally designed the assignment, the teachers would’ve presented to the entire class. One teacher from each group would’ve been talking. This would’ve taken more time and resulted in fewer teachers leading/talking/explaining. By having each table become a talking point, many more teachers were leading/talking/explaining and participating. This also led to the idea of the feat of being wrong. One of the teachers said “But we don’t know what to do…”. He meant that this was something new for them.

The teachers provided valuable feedback as we asked them to reflect on their role as a student learning the material and a teacher who would present the material. They had lots of questions. They found the material difficult and asked about students doing this level of material. This led us to a terrific discussion about leveling work. We discussed the ideas of Zone of Proximal Development (though we didn’t use the term). Our discussion focused on the example of children learning to walk. During this class, explosions were heard outside the classroom. The explosions did NOT interrupt the class at all. It turns out that there was a wedding and the explosions were the fireworks from the wedding. One of the questions that came up was the difficulty of the text. The teachers wanted to know about the whether we would assign something like this to our students. They mostly assign stories to their students. We talked about using informational text with students. This also led to the discussion about leveled reading. We shared the idea of differentiating ideas. We also shared the Lesson Writer site. My teaching partner has an account and showed how you can create different lessons by adjusting parts of the lesson. For example, vocabulary can be adjusted based on student need. We also shared Newsela. We showed how the same story could be presented at different levels automatically.

It is interesting the number of pictures that the teachers are taking. Almost all of them obviously have a cell phone with them. They frequently take pictures of the screen as we are presenting, pictures of examples, and even videos. The cell phones are also used for looking up words that they are unfamiliar with.

We did our Story Cubes Bell Ringer activity. This time we did 5 words instead of just 4. We talked about why we upped the number of words with them. They wrote and shared their writing with each other.

We had a rich discussion about learning styles and how long it takes to develop these. Thus, my teaching partner came up with homework for teachers. It took less than ten minutes to present the lesson and provide them with the rules and examples. We talked about moving the work from teachers to students.

Homework:

  1. Choose a children’s song.
  2. Remove the words and replace with the 23 non-action verbs (listed below).
  3. Include movement.
  4. Groups of 1-4.
  5. You perform in 3 days.

23 non-action verbs.
* am
* is
* are
* was
* were
* be
* being
* been
* do
* does
* did
* have
* has
* had
* may
* might
* must
* can
* could
* shall
* should
* will
* would

Interestingly, many of the students stayed after Homeroom was over and we could hear children’s songs playing. There was lots of positive noise and discussion. Plenty of laughter.