Trashketball!

     State testing starts next week.  (I can only assume a rant & rave post about that will follow soon after).  In the meantime, here's a review game that I played with my students to help them with figurative language!
     The game is called Trashketball, and the Powerpoint & instructions can be found here.  To be honest, it's a review game that could be easily adapted to any standard or skill your kids are working on, but it was a perfect culmination to our frenzied figurative language unit.
     I gave each group of 4-6 students a marker and 10 sheets of paper.  While viewing Powerpoint slides, the students work in groups to answer questions about the type(s) of figurative language displayed.  They have about a minute to come up with the correct answer, then we go over it.  Any group with the correct answer gets to save their answer sheet.  Wrong answers go straight to the recycling bin (I'm nothing if not eco-friendly).  After all 10 questions have been answered, the teams get their correct answer sheets back.  Some groups had all 10, others had as few as 6 or 7.  Then they get a chance to shoot their correct answers into the recycling bin (see?  eco-friendly!).  We drew lines with tape on the floor too represent a 1-point line, a 2-point line, and a 3-point line.
     At first, the kids thought the lines were too close and it would be super easy.  They were totally wrong.  We had several shots bank off the whiteboard behind the "basket", and quite a few also bounce right off my (ceiling-mounted) projector.
     The team with the most points at the end won the game-and they couldn't stop talking about how much fun they'd had.  Apparently, I should try this strategy more often.

Text Features

During our Egypt unit, we spend the majority of our time on non-fiction Egyptian selections.  There are a huge number of books out there that grab kids'attention and really get them interested in the Egyptian culture.    I have about 75 of those books, and the kids love sorting through them and comparing what they've read.  This post is NOT about one of those texts :)

This post is focusing on one of those other kinds of texts-the kind that kids don't really love to read, but unfortunately does a great job of breaking down the information they need about a particular topic.  During today's class, we spent our time working in pairs with a general "Ancient Egypt" article.  The article itself was about 6 pages long, but it was interspersed with loads of pictures, graphics, sidebars, charts, and captions.  There were also several thought-provoking questions that required activating their schema, making connections to those other texts, and using the information in the article itself.

While working, to make it a little more tactile, I handed out highlighters and mini Post-It notes to each student.  They were allowed to use the highlighters to highlight important information, and use one Post-It per page to record one text feature they found.  While I use Post-Its almost daily in my room, I almost never use highlighters.  For one, they aren't allowed to use them on the state test, so I like them to be familiar with simply underlining.  But also, I find that they blatant overuse of highlighting text to be so frustrating!  They get so into using colors that they often end up highlighting the entire text...which is worse than highlighting nothing!  But, I think that every once in a while it's good, because it gets them out of a rut and lets them have a little fun, especially while reading something that can get a little monotonous.

Our text features anchor chart

My own version of a Post-It note (what else can I use my yellow dry-erase markers for?!)

 
What lessons do you create for your class to make things a little more engaging?

Killing Them Softly

This week was a really tough week.  For the kids, I mean-not for me.  It was essentially a break week for me, but my students are probably ready to jump off of a bridge.  Sure, we were off on Monday for Labor Day, but Tuesday-Friday was just one big assessment.  Tuesday & Wednesday our students had to take a Pro-Ohio Baseline test in Reading & Math.  Pro-Ohio is an online test-prep program that gives the students practice for our state-test, the OAA.  Then Thursday & Friday, we had the kids take an actual OAA practice test, again in Reading & Math.

Oh, did I mention that it was close to 100* in our rooms all week?  By Friday afternoon, the kids looked like overheated zombies.  I brought in popsicles to congratulate them for making it through such a miserable week, which they were excited about, but I think they were just grateful to be done with tests!

I think next week we'll actually start with real "school".  My plans include an actual launch of Reader's Workshop as well as some real, live Writing!  I'm excited to do something besides monitor test-taking, and I think my kids are excited to do something besides bubble in answer documents.  Stay tuned for an update!