On the move

We completed our travel blogs . This unit was a learning experience for me and my students. I started with trying to answer the question of what my students needed to know about geography and how to make it relevant to their lives. My teaching partner suggested they make brochures about places to visit in our state. To support our goal of integrating more technology we changed the final product from a brochure to a travel blog. I started my creating a  sample blog entry . This generated a lot of excitement with the students that they could be bloggers, too. From my sample, we created a rubric for what a quality travel blog entry should have. I was impressed at the thought process of the students. We also defined some key terms such as blog, hyperlink and rubric. The next step was to have the students research locations. I put links to websites on a  Symbaloo page . This kept the research focused. I provided some documents to support the students as they researched. These I develo

At our Elementary Leadership PLC, we learned an instructional strategy for math. I was so excited about this new strategy that I tried it the next day.  Three Reads for Math  is a close read strategy for problem solving. The steps are 1) read the question stem orally without any numbers. Ask the students to describe the context or situation of the story. Step 2) the problem stem is read with the numbers and projected for the students to read along. The students then think of questions that could be answered with the information presented. Step 3) Present the question to be solved and work in groups to solve the problem. What I really like about this strategy is the students focus on the language of math. They do not default into "harvesting" numbers and choosing an operation at random. Even more exciting is to hear the questions that the students generate. Reading the problem and focusing on the context, helps the students to identify what the language of the problem necessa