Just Chatting

Well we’ve been trucking along and things are still going well. Of course we had a shortened week last week with the holiday but now we’re back to work. I still teach grammar. I’ve heard a lot of public schools no longer teach grammatical conventions and parts of speech. Wow that is somewhat shocking?! How can kids learn how to write if they don’t understand the basics of a sentence? Well I guess I’m feeling “old school” but I’m teaching verbs right now. I have found dozens of good pre-made SMART notebook activities that I can download but I’ve practiced making a few too. Yesterday I gave a lesson where I used the textbook (oh how ancient) as a guide. I used it for the questions and then I made a word bank. The kids got up in a line in front of the board and I set the timer for 2 minutes. They had to silently answer any question they could and then go to the back of the line. When it was the next student’s turn, he or she had the option of answering their own new question or correcting someone else’s mistake. The goal was to silently answer all the questions correctly in under 2 minutes.

Well can you believe THEY DID IT? This group seldom can get a pencil and paper out in less than 5 minutes and most of the time, working independently from the textbook they don’t come close to finishing the lesson. So this was GREAT! I think a big part of it was that they didn’t get bogged down with the mechanics of writing because they could just drag their finger across the screen to answer a question. Another thing was that they were working together and so one wrong answer didn’t fall on that one person who made the mistake—everyone else had a chance to correct it—so it was a great group activity. Finally, I think the fact that they had to evaluate all the questions AND the answers and were able to complete the activity in a game like setting was a key factor for making this lesson work. I will definitely be trying something like this again in the future.