February 24, 2012

February 24, 2012

The Having of Wonderful Ideas

This design principle is always one I can remember, and the first that I was drawn to six years ago. Picture those students in your crew who you see ready to burst; waving their arm, shouting out, standing up at their desk and leaning into the group! They are so fired up to share what they are thinking and learning! Often it is your questions, at the right time, that inspire your students to invent wonderful ideas!

Responsive teaching supports this design principle. We have a lesson plan, we know the target and we monitor how it is going. Through our experience and our responsiveness to follow the lead of our students as they learn, we may make a shift, inspired to do something different, as a child's thought process leads the class down an unexpected direction. In this type of classroom, the teacher is the guide. This is where the role of our questioning is critical in guiding and igniting the 'having of wonderful ideas'.

"The main difference between these students and those in other, more conventional classes we've taught is that they are what we call brave learners."

"Expeditionary Learning schools encourage all students to posit, question, and explore instead of simply repeat and fill in the blanks. The students have time and space to pursue spontaneous inspirations. They learn to think."

The design principle: The Having of Wonderful Ideas

Teach so as to build on children's curiosity about the world by creating learning situations that provide matter to think about, time to experiment, and time to make sense of what is observed.

Foster a community where students' and adults' ideas are respected.

Calendar

Week of February 27th - March 2nd:

Tuesday 28th:

* RTI 7:30 a.m.

* Neil & Lindsey Crew's Winter Voyage

Wednesday 29th:

* All School Meeting: Ms. Jill's Crew Hosts

* 6th grade to Art Museum

* Lauren & Brittany Crew's Winter Voyage

Friday, March 2nd: 

*Teacher Work Day

* Texas Independence Day (ask Bill Dowdle about this!)

Week of March 5 -9th:

CSAP Window

Tuesday 6th:

* RTI meeting 7:15 a.m.

Love and Logic Teacher-ism:

When a child says "Not fair," smart teachers whisper, "I respect you too much to argue."

Wise teachers respond to a whiney "But why?" with "If you don't figure that out by next week I'll explain it."

Mid-Year Reflection

Thank you for taking 15 minutes to reflect on your goals and how things are going for you this year. Your feedback was valuable to me. Please never hesitate to let me know how I can support you.

I know my own mid-year reflection helped steer me back on course.

Morning Message:

On the Responsive Classroom Blog, here is what some teachers had to share about how they are working together on planning for Morning Message:

Submitted by Babs Freeman-Loftis on February 13, 2012.

These are great ideas, Margaret!  I recently worked with some dedicated teachers in Memphis City Schools who were excited about shared planning opportunities for morning messages.  The teachers were definitely feeling like they were in a bit of a “rut” in terms of running out of ideas for generating creative and engaging messages for students.  The teachers decided to try rotating the duty of writing the daily message.  With five teachers on the first grade team, they each took responsibility for writing one message per week – and they came up with daily themes, similar to your ideas here.   Teachers had the option of using the shared message or creating their own.  The group exchanged their ideas during their weekly PLC meetings.  Another grade level came up with the idea of doing a morning message walk - where the teachers would just walk through each others' rooms in the morning (or afternoon) to read the different messages.  It was a great way for teachers to gather new ideas and to get into their colleagues' classrooms.

Submitted by Sarah Fillion on February 14, 2012.

I love the idea of planning out the messages for the week with a theme in mind for each day!  That would also help with planning out some of the other components as well.  I used that method to keep my meetings fresh.  For example, on the literacy day, I would have my students do a Dynamic Reading of a Poem and we might use an Adjective greeting. 

A teacher I worked with would pull in "this day in history" on days she was focusing on social studies and might give a word brainteaser (example: eiln pu - line up in alphabetical order) on her literacy day to have the students thinking and interacting with the message in a variety of ways.

A group of teachers I recently worked with create their messages on Smart Boards and created a shared file that they just drop their messages into so others can pull and modify them.  Technology has made it a lot easier to share and recreate messages pretty quickly.

Report from the health room:

"A student from Ms. Mary Beth's crew was in the health room.
 He said to Kirsten, "Oh, my head hurts sooo bad. Everything I've learned is going to burst out!"

Featured Folks:


unknown author(s) we await you...

Peek Into the Life of our School:

Our very own snowman!
Thanks Eric for all you do when you arrive early on those bad weather days
 to clear a path for all of us!
(Glad Chevy brought you a well deserved Starbucks!)

Jill is trying something she has always wanted to do...Explore Time.
This is how Nico spent his first Explore time...a personal project;
he made this belt complete with velcro fasteners.
 Can you tell he's a little bit proud?

Add caption

Lauren and Brittany support their learners in the first steps of their writing genre.
The kids are using the content they learned during their recent field work to Garden of the Gods.
Can you guess what they are learning about?
Great way to blend the learning within an expedition with a genre study in writing.

Mary Sue created a paragraph prompt writing checklist for her students.

Neil provides his students with some practice with test taking items AND provides specific feedback about what works. If you didn't know about the CSAP, you'd think Neil was doing a lesson on critical thinking! Every student was engaged!

If you taught kindergarten you'd never take letter formation for granted again!
Gotta love learning in a bulb blooming environment!
Bulbs blooming on every table. Smells good too!
(Perhaps 6th grade should consider growing bulbs??)

6th Grade is learning about pop culture and photography in an effort to document the "Strangeness of the Ordinary". They did a "walk about" around Castle Rock to capture images of their surroundings from different perspectives. They are now working on overlaying these images with text that encourage their audience to think creatively and "outside of the box".

(Is our school cool, or what?)

Have a great weekend!

Deborah