Tool Kits

If you haven't tried them already, create some tool kits for your students here at the beginning of the year.  They're good at all grade levels for keeping kids hands-on engaged in text.  You'll just need a seal-top plastic baggie for each student.  Gradually, give them tools that you'll direct them to use for different purposes such as: glitter sticks (craft sticks dipped in glue and then in glitter, used to track print or to locate clues, etc.), word frames (dye cut shapes with rectangular windows cut out and then laminated so that words can be located through the window), highlighters, Wikki-Stix, PC highlighters (opaque plastic strips in various colors), VIP strips (a small pack of Post-Its cut towards the sticky end without cutting through----used by ripping off the small strips to use as flags by words/clues in the text), notecards,  and other items.  When students read, you'll tell them to get the VIP strips out of their toolboxes to flag all clues that let them know the traits of the main character or to find the characteristics of a certain type of rock or to flag key points that they can use to summarize the piece.  These keep students from day-dreaming and let you know in a glance who's with you and who's not.  There's a piece about tool kits on my web site in the Fun Stuff section.  Hope you'll give them a try!

Ways to use wordle.net and wordsift.com

One of my readers asked that I share some of the ways that this week's training group in Pennsylvania brainstormed using Wordle.net and wordsift.com.  Here are some of the ideas:

If you cut and paste text in the box or add your own words to the box to have the web site create the word cloud, use with students to:

• Have them make predictions about what they'll be reading/studying.
• Review the words that will be in the text.
• Explicitly teach the words that are rarest (wordsift shows you which ones).
• Have them vertify by reading whether the words are truly key words and have them prioritize them in order of importance to the topic/meaning.
• Insert a few words that don't belong in the word cloud and ask that they defend all words that belong and indentify thewords that don't belong.
• As assessment, let them use your word cloud to write a summary of what was read.

If students are creating the word clouds:

• Have them read and decide which are the key words and design their own word clouds.
• Have them crreate a word cloud for every chapter of a text, based on importance of the words.
• Have them create a wordle that describes the character, setting, conflict, etc. of a piece of fiction.  They can present it to the class and let their peers guess which character they are describing.
• Have them create a word cloud that explains their thinking as they solve a math problem/equation.
• Have them create a word cloud that represents the era of history that they're studying.
• With wordsift.com, let them create words and pictures that best represent what they are reading/studying.  (Using the workspace option, you can drag words and pictures into a new cloud.)
• As assessment, ask students to create word clouds that show the key words of what was learned.
• Let coop groups create word clouds as they read.  Then these word clouds can be traded wtih other coop groups to compare and contrast the words that were selected.  Why were some words selected and others not?

Hope this helps!  If you have additional ideas for the use of these 2 web sites, please share them with us!

 

 

Personalize geography in your class!

Geogreeting.com is another neat web site to use in your classroom that will help you personalize world geography.  On this site, you can input a short message or greeting.  Then, the site will take you on a "google earth" type trip to find buildings and structures around the world that physically spell out your greeting.  Too cool!  You can easily email your message to others, or you can just show this on the screen in your classroom.  It amazes students!  If you try it, let me know how it goes.

another resource

Here's another web site that you'll LOVE!  Wordsift.com is initially a lot like the site I shared last week (wordle.net), but it has so much more to offer.  If you can project this site onto a screen in your classroom, you'll have unbelievable teaching opportunities.  Again, you start by pasting in the text you want to explore.  The site will choose the top 50 key words that appear frequently and will organize them by font size from the rarest to the most common words or just the opposite.  This allows you to teach the rare words.  You can click on any of the words and images will appear as well as a word web of related words to teach the nuances of the word.  Also, the sentences from your text that contain those words will appear so that you can explore the word in different contexts.  There's a short video at the site that suggests different ways to use it, including making predictions and even using it for assessment.  It's an amazing site!  If you use it, please share back how it went in your classroom. 

Teachers, you'll love this web site!

If you're a teacher who deals with vocabulary (and what teacher doesn't deal with vocabulary?), you're gonna love this web site!  At Wordle.net, you can paste text that you're teaching, and the site will determine the keywords and will arrange them into a really neat,  eye-catching graphic.  You can also just type in a list of words that you want students to explore, and it will arrange them in a dazzling graphic.  If you don't like the way they mix the words, click on "random" and it will continue to give you different configuration, colors and fonts, or you can customize your own.  How can you use this?  1) Prior to studying a unit, flash the list on your SmartBoard or print the list for students.  Give them time to discuss and make predictions about what they'll be studying.  2) After studying, give students the graphic of keywords and ask them to use it to write a summary of the unit.  Or, 3) Let your students create their own Wordle from what they think are the key words in your unit.  You're gonna love this site!  Let me know how you use it!