Leah Pells July 14th -2009 Lesson #2: The Penguin lesson: extracting information from the text. I really enjoyed the word cloud in this lesson. I could see that this is a fun activity you could use to generate information for any subject, not just reading. Even having a cloud on the wall and having changeable topics. Very cool idea ladies. The lesson was interesting and kept us all very involved, great job! Cheers, Leah
Well, any group that hands out chocolate is bound to be a crowd favorite! I appreciated that every student’s input was valued in this lesson. No matter how far out in left field the question was (why do penguins always wear tuxedos?) the question was written on the board. I think it’s so important for students to see that their input matters, and that the teacher will write it on the board. Sometimes in classrooms students who often have the correct answer will get their input put on the board more often than their peers, and students notice that. It was also a great idea to assign roles to each student in the group. Even at the high school level, this is so important. If students don’t have roles, they are way more likely to screw around and not contribute (I know this first hand!) So well done! And thanks for the chocolate!
I really liked how you used the first few minutes of the lesson to activate prior knowledge. By just asking a general question, such as ‘what do you know about penguins’ is a great way to get students thinking about the topic and pulling up what they already know about it – this is essential to comprehending new information. The word cloud idea was also great, not only because the students were given the opportunity to brainstorm any ideas/thoughts they might have, but also because it gave them something visual to refer back to. My favourite part of the activity was how you delegated the tasks in each group. I think this is a great classroom management strategy as well as a simple way to make sure that all the students are contributing to the task. Giving each student a responsibility is a good way to make sure everyone is involved in the lesson. Finally, I liked the class book idea – students love to see the work that they’ve done and having a class book that is easily accessible to them is a fantastic way for them to show off all their hard work!
I enjoyed your lesson and thought that you all did a nice job presenting it to our class.The word cloud was great. While you were doing your lesson, I was thinking that I was back at my practicum and that I did something like this with the students. It was great how you divided us up into groups and we all had to work on a fact about penguins and at the end we ended up with a lot of different information about them. As you have mentioned, in the classroom with students you would probably assign them roles for the first time, and then maybe the next time allow them to make their own groups. But this does depend on the age level. Also, creating a giant book is a good idea; through this children can celebrate their success and hard work. Thanks for your lesson and all the books that your brought in, it was fun.
+ I like the activity of having a recorder, drawer, speaker and coming up with a topic with your group. I like the discovery and roles aspects.
? I’m wondering because the lesson is for younger students, you are going to get some unusual answers and questions. Some responses we may find “incorrect.” How as a teacher can we best prevent this from occurring? Is it something that needs to be prevented??? You did a good job in modelling how to in your lesson but its an interesting thing to further discuss I think.
I like how you started the lesson by activating prior knowledge. This gets students thinking about the topic area and gets ideas and questions flowing in their minds. The class brainstorming is a great visual that accepts everyone’s ideas. I like the idea of providing students with lots of resources such as books, internet, library, etc. Creating a class book at the end is a wonderful way to display everyone’s work in a finished product.
The collaboration between each student was excellent, I particularly liked the idea of choosing different roles for each student. I plan to use that strategy in my class at the next opportunity. The chocolate always helps to get students interested as well.
Well-done! This lesson had a lot of really great points to it but for the purpose of providing feedback I just wanted to mention 2. The first thing that I would like to comment on is that I thought your group did I really great job of illustrating the importance of providing children with access to non-fiction reading material in the classroom. I appreciated all of the books that you brought in to class, and thought that you did a nice job of stressing how important it is for the classroom to be full of relevant material. At the same time, however, I also thought it was great that you mentioned how you would extend this activity if you were teaching it in a real classroom- such as taking the children to the school library, and possibly even using the internet to better answer student questions. The second thing that I really liked about your lesson (and will probably copy in the future) was your word cloud. It was a nice way to brainstorm without using a web format, and the best part was that you accepted all student answers into the ‘cloud’. I think this is a great tool because it definitely showed that you were interested in hearing from every one. It made the classroom, a safe place for all students to share their thoughts without fear that their ideas would be wrong. I also liked the idea of assigning roles, but do agree with the class that roles should be rotated somehow so that everyone gets a chance to do what they excel at! Excellent lesson ladies and thanks again for the chocolate!!!
Another great lesson! You used so many different comprehension strategies, it was hard to keep track! I really liked that you used the Think-Pair-Share strategy. I find that for those of us who are a little bit more introverted, it helps to have time to think and talk about what I am thinking about before I am under pressure to share it with the whole class. I also really liked the cooperative learning portion of the lesson because I like knowing throughout an activity what my role is. The expectations were clear and easy to follow, which made it easier to focus on the reading strategy itself. One thing that I’ve seen done (by my 405 SA) was to create necklaces for the kids with name tags in a clear plastic cover, with the role descriptions on the back. This way, whenever students get into groups, they can look at the role description if they need a reminder of what to do.
Loved the word cloud. This was a great way to get all of their thoughts and ideas out to begin the process. I think it's always nice for students to be able to incorporate their "serious" thoughts with their "silly" thoughts and this was a productive way of doing this. I thought the group work aspect was a nice way of working together and sharing our information and the gallery walk would help to showcase what everyone learned. This way the students would better understand penguins outside of their own research. Well done!
Once again it was great to see how engaging a non-fiction reading lesson can be. The idea cloud was a great class brain storming tool and I liked that you accepted both funny and serious inquries from the students. My daughter studied penguins in grade one and loved it so it was nice to see it done so well in our class too. I liked that the class storybook allowed for differing student abilities. There was room for a detailed or simplistic drawing and lots of room to write a lot of a little in very big printing. It was also colourful, structured and purposeful. I really enjoyed it. And kuddos (sp?) to you for going after the ning nang nong song… not an easy thing to do.
Mable, Janaya, Julia & Tessa - extracting information from texts
I really enjoyed this lesson. I thought it was great that students had a choice to write or draw or do both based on their ability or what they felt comfortable doing. I also liked how student's were all given a task, to ensure that everyone was responsible for something. I really appreciated this because we often find in group projects that some students will put in more effort than others or contribute more to a group activity. By assigning tasks, it holds each student accountable and I think makes everyone important to the project/activity.
I liked the word/question cloud. I think this is great to have on the board because it can help students remember what questions they are exploring. Also, with silly questions or normal questions, by putting on the board and having all students contribute, it helps students who may not have thought of something to see this cloud and think, "hmmm ... i never thought of that, but it seems really interesting." I think sharing ideas could help some students spark interest in the topic that is being discussed.
Classroom brainstorming is an effective way to get the ball rolling. It allows the students to see what they already know and tests their ideas in a safe way. The word cloud as a collection tool is an easy and quick way to facilitate the information gathering. I like taking the six key ideas that, as a class have been prioritized. The group work further allows the students to express themselves in unique ways. The rotation of jobs gives each child an opportunity to explore information gathering, recording, illustration and presenting. A thorough lesson plan is not that easy to accomplish but you have done so. Congratulations!
Also, on a personal note I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to draw!!!It is so important to incorporate art into your lessons. I feel like that part of me has been so stifled with all the academic work. I LOVED drawing my penguin! Because I drew it I can tell you that it was an Emperor penguin, its colours were white, black, yellow, orange and grey. When it sat on its nest the blubber overflows the nest and the baby is kept warm by the folds of the blubber. The mother and the father takes turns sitting on the next as the baby will freeze without their parents’ warmth. This tells me what kind of a learner I am!
I am a big fan of collaborative learning... so I really liked this lesson. I was also VERY impressed with the number of resources you brought in!! I thought the way prior knowledge was accessed right from the beginning was great - before even saying anything, kids would see all the books and start thinking about penguins. I also liked the way, as our groups talked and generated questions, you wrote them in a word cloud--great visual!! I think your initial idea to assign questions to each group (but they were missing??) worked out better the way it "happened" -- the original way might prevent overlap in reporting, but this way we were able to research what we were interested in, and ultimately increased student engagement level.
My favourite part (as with a lot of our class) was that each member of the group had a different "job" they needed to do. I was in the group that had the "random choice" assignment roles. This is a great idea for classroom mgmt, and student expectations-- ensuring everyone is contributing within the group. I really liked the setup of this lesson!
Your information was well presented, well organized and engaging! :)
The lesson about Penguins was interesting. I liked how you adapted the traditional brainstorm model and made it into a word cloud, it was nice to see this different approach. I found that participating in the whole group discussion to add to the word cloud was easy. The environment that this group created was low-risk because they had scaffolded the lesson so that students could discuss their ideas in groups or with partners before they participated in the class. This is an excellent strategy for students that have a small amount of prior knowledge, for shy students, and for ESL students. It was a great visual tool that we could refer back to when we were looking for a concept to focus on in the group discussion later.
The other part of this lesson I thought was good was the fact that you would take students work and compile it into a class book. In the classroom that I did my practicum in, the class books that they had created at the back of the classroom were books that were frequently read. Students really enjoyed looking at their classmates and their own work, it built up their confidence and the feeling of community in the classroom. Analogous to what one of the group members mentioned, sometimes the students thought the books that they had created were better than the one that the author had completed. This creative cross-curricular activity, which incorporated Language Arts and Art, aids in the students seeing connections between school work and real world products like books. I believe that this group did a good job of illustrating that school projects do have real-world crossover.
I loved the word cloud idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a permanent cloud somewhere on the wall in the classroom that you could erase after so you could use it over and over? I could really see kids using it as a safe place to share their ideas. How did you ever find so many books on penguins??? Well done. I also thought having each group member have a specific task is such a great strategy to ensure that everyone participates. Isn’t interesting how motivating a small piece of chocolate is? That was a great touch. Cheers Sharon
This was a great activity and I could definitely see myself using this with a grade 5 level. The researching aspect, especially if computers are used, is something that kids love to do. Simply finding this information out about an interesting subject is a great idea to keep children engaged. A team approach where everyone has specific tasks and provides structure to what can sometimes be unstructured. I enjoyed the activity and would definitely use this in my classroom.
Group 2: Extracting info from texts. I liked that you gathered up a variety of books and had them on display, for me, this build excitement and curiosity for the lesson, I wondered what we were going to do with the books. The strategy of assigning roles for group work is very effective for ensuring involvement from each student; it increases accountability. The word cloud is a nice idea too and Leah’s idea of having one on the wall and using it for a variety of subjects and topics is great, It can also be part of the shape of the day/month... Nicely done.
Group 2: Reading Strategies using predicting, inferencing, imaging, and decoding of text will prove very helpful. I liked the use of expert groups; nice way if random assignment to roles. A great collaborative strategy – and the gallery walk idea is always fun. Great job all of you!
This is a topic that I’ve worked on with both fiction and non fiction texts. With non fiction texts, I like using the class wide brainstorm, a class wide KWL or a think-pair-share strategy, just to get students ready to share and comfortable with what they want to say before they do it. When working with the text, I like using Questioning strategies-kids should generate questions they have that can be answered in the text, or using Here, Hidden and Head questions. Here questions can be found directly spelled out in the text, Hidden questions can be inferred or figured out from clues and Head questions come from student’s background knowledge. Asking questions helps student’s focus on the type of information they are trying to find. Another great way that I saw mentioned in the discussions of the presentation-assigning groups gives students a guide and a focus while researching which helps to find the pertinent information.
Leah Pells
ReplyDeleteJuly 14th -2009
Lesson #2:
The Penguin lesson: extracting information from the text.
I really enjoyed the word cloud in this lesson. I could see that this is a fun activity you could use to generate information for any subject, not just reading. Even having a cloud on the wall and having changeable topics. Very cool idea ladies.
The lesson was interesting and kept us all very involved, great job!
Cheers, Leah
Well, any group that hands out chocolate is bound to be a crowd favorite! I appreciated that every student’s input was valued in this lesson. No matter how far out in left field the question was (why do penguins always wear tuxedos?) the question was written on the board. I think it’s so important for students to see that their input matters, and that the teacher will write it on the board. Sometimes in classrooms students who often have the correct answer will get their input put on the board more often than their peers, and students notice that. It was also a great idea to assign roles to each student in the group. Even at the high school level, this is so important. If students don’t have roles, they are way more likely to screw around and not contribute (I know this first hand!) So well done! And thanks for the chocolate!
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you used the first few minutes of the lesson to activate prior knowledge. By just asking a general question, such as ‘what do you know about penguins’ is a great way to get students thinking about the topic and pulling up what they already know about it – this is essential to comprehending new information. The word cloud idea was also great, not only because the students were given the opportunity to brainstorm any ideas/thoughts they might have, but also because it gave them something visual to refer back to. My favourite part of the activity was how you delegated the tasks in each group. I think this is a great classroom management strategy as well as a simple way to make sure that all the students are contributing to the task. Giving each student a responsibility is a good way to make sure everyone is involved in the lesson. Finally, I liked the class book idea – students love to see the work that they’ve done and having a class book that is easily accessible to them is a fantastic way for them to show off all their hard work!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your lesson and thought that you all did a nice job presenting it to our class.The word cloud was great. While you were doing your lesson, I was thinking that I was back at my practicum and that I did something like this with the students. It was great how you divided us up into groups and we all had to work on a fact about penguins and at the end we ended up with a lot of different information about them. As you have mentioned, in the classroom with students you would probably assign them roles for the first time, and then maybe the next time allow them to make their own groups. But this does depend on the age level. Also, creating a giant book is a good idea; through this children can celebrate their success and hard work. Thanks for your lesson and all the books that your brought in, it was fun.
ReplyDeleteGroup 2 (Penguins)
ReplyDelete+ I like the activity of having a recorder, drawer, speaker and coming up with a topic with your group. I like the discovery and roles aspects.
? I’m wondering because the lesson is for younger students, you are going to get some unusual answers and questions. Some responses we may find “incorrect.” How as a teacher can we best prevent this from occurring? Is it something that needs to be prevented??? You did a good job in modelling how to in your lesson but its an interesting thing to further discuss I think.
Ashok K. – Good job yesterday & God Bless :)
I like how you started the lesson by activating prior knowledge. This gets students thinking about the topic area and gets ideas and questions flowing in their minds. The class brainstorming is a great visual that accepts everyone’s ideas. I like the idea of providing students with lots of resources such as books, internet, library, etc. Creating a class book at the end is a wonderful way to display everyone’s work in a finished product.
ReplyDeleteThe collaboration between each student was excellent, I particularly liked the idea of choosing different roles for each student. I plan to use that strategy in my class at the next opportunity. The chocolate always helps to get students interested as well.
ReplyDeleteWell-done! This lesson had a lot of really great points to it but for the purpose of providing feedback I just wanted to mention 2. The first thing that I would like to comment on is that I thought your group did I really great job of illustrating the importance of providing children with access to non-fiction reading material in the classroom. I appreciated all of the books that you brought in to class, and thought that you did a nice job of stressing how important it is for the classroom to be full of relevant material. At the same time, however, I also thought it was great that you mentioned how you would extend this activity if you were teaching it in a real classroom- such as taking the children to the school library, and possibly even using the internet to better answer student questions.
ReplyDeleteThe second thing that I really liked about your lesson (and will probably copy in the future) was your word cloud. It was a nice way to brainstorm without using a web format, and the best part was that you accepted all student answers into the ‘cloud’. I think this is a great tool because it definitely showed that you were interested in hearing from every one. It made the classroom, a safe place for all students to share their thoughts without fear that their ideas would be wrong. I also liked the idea of assigning roles, but do agree with the class that roles should be rotated somehow so that everyone gets a chance to do what they excel at! Excellent lesson ladies and thanks again for the chocolate!!!
Another great lesson! You used so many different comprehension strategies, it was hard to keep track! I really liked that you used the Think-Pair-Share strategy. I find that for those of us who are a little bit more introverted, it helps to have time to think and talk about what I am thinking about before I am under pressure to share it with the whole class. I also really liked the cooperative learning portion of the lesson because I like knowing throughout an activity what my role is. The expectations were clear and easy to follow, which made it easier to focus on the reading strategy itself. One thing that I’ve seen done (by my 405 SA) was to create necklaces for the kids with name tags in a clear plastic cover, with the role descriptions on the back. This way, whenever students get into groups, they can look at the role description if they need a reminder of what to do.
ReplyDeleteLoved the word cloud. This was a great way to get all of their thoughts and ideas out to begin the process. I think it's always nice for students to be able to incorporate their "serious" thoughts with their "silly" thoughts and this was a productive way of doing this. I thought the group work aspect was a nice way of working together and sharing our information and the gallery walk would help to showcase what everyone learned. This way the students would better understand penguins outside of their own research.
ReplyDeleteWell done!
Once again it was great to see how engaging a non-fiction reading lesson can be. The idea cloud was a great class brain storming tool and I liked that you accepted both funny and serious inquries from the students. My daughter studied penguins in grade one and loved it so it was nice to see it done so well in our class too. I liked that the class storybook allowed for differing student abilities. There was room for a detailed or simplistic drawing and lots of room to write a lot of a little in very big printing. It was also colourful, structured and purposeful. I really enjoyed it. And kuddos (sp?) to you for going after the ning nang nong song… not an easy thing to do.
ReplyDeleteMable, Janaya, Julia & Tessa - extracting information from texts
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this lesson. I thought it was great that students had a choice to write or draw or do both based on their ability or what they felt comfortable doing. I also liked how student's were all given a task, to ensure that everyone was responsible for something. I really appreciated this because we often find in group projects that some students will put in more effort than others or contribute more to a group activity. By assigning tasks, it holds each student accountable and I think makes everyone important to the project/activity.
I liked the word/question cloud. I think this is great to have on the board because it can help students remember what questions they are exploring. Also, with silly questions or normal questions, by putting on the board and having all students contribute, it helps students who may not have thought of something to see this cloud and think, "hmmm ... i never thought of that, but it seems really interesting." I think sharing ideas could help some students spark interest in the topic that is being discussed.
Great Work!
Classroom brainstorming is an effective way to get the ball rolling. It allows the students to see what they already know and tests their ideas in a safe way. The word cloud as a collection tool is an easy and quick way to facilitate the information gathering. I like taking the six key ideas that, as a class have been prioritized. The group work further allows the students to express themselves in unique ways. The rotation of jobs gives each child an opportunity to explore information gathering, recording, illustration and presenting. A thorough lesson plan is not that easy to accomplish but you have done so. Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteAlso, on a personal note I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to draw!!!It is so important to incorporate art into your lessons. I feel like that part of me has been so stifled with all the academic work. I LOVED drawing my penguin! Because I drew it I can tell you that it was an Emperor penguin, its colours were white, black, yellow, orange and grey. When it sat on its nest the blubber overflows the nest and the baby is kept warm by the folds of the blubber. The mother and the father takes turns sitting on the next as the baby will freeze without their parents’ warmth. This tells me what kind of a learner I am!
I am a big fan of collaborative learning... so I really liked this lesson. I was also VERY impressed with the number of resources you brought in!!
ReplyDeleteI thought the way prior knowledge was accessed right from the beginning was great - before even saying anything, kids would see all the books and start thinking about penguins. I also liked the way, as our groups talked and generated questions, you wrote them in a word cloud--great visual!! I think your initial idea to assign questions to each group (but they were missing??) worked out better the way it "happened" -- the original way might prevent overlap in reporting, but this way we were able to research what we were interested in, and ultimately increased student engagement level.
My favourite part (as with a lot of our class) was that each member of the group had a different "job" they needed to do. I was in the group that had the "random choice" assignment roles. This is a great idea for classroom mgmt, and student expectations-- ensuring everyone is contributing within the group. I really liked the setup of this lesson!
Your information was well presented, well organized and engaging! :)
The lesson about Penguins was interesting. I liked how you adapted the traditional brainstorm model and made it into a word cloud, it was nice to see this different approach. I found that participating in the whole group discussion to add to the word cloud was easy. The environment that this group created was low-risk because they had scaffolded the lesson so that students could discuss their ideas in groups or with partners before they participated in the class. This is an excellent strategy for students that have a small amount of prior knowledge, for shy students, and for ESL students. It was a great visual tool that we could refer back to when we were looking for a concept to focus on in the group discussion later.
ReplyDeleteThe other part of this lesson I thought was good was the fact that you would take students work and compile it into a class book. In the classroom that I did my practicum in, the class books that they had created at the back of the classroom were books that were frequently read. Students really enjoyed looking at their classmates and their own work, it built up their confidence and the feeling of community in the classroom. Analogous to what one of the group members mentioned, sometimes the students thought the books that they had created were better than the one that the author had completed. This creative cross-curricular activity, which incorporated Language Arts and Art, aids in the students seeing connections between school work and real world products like books. I believe that this group did a good job of illustrating that school projects do have real-world crossover.
I loved the word cloud idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a permanent cloud somewhere on the wall in the classroom that you could erase after so you could use it over and over? I could really see kids using it as a safe place to share their ideas. How did you ever find so many books on penguins??? Well done. I also thought having each group member have a specific task is such a great strategy to ensure that everyone participates.
ReplyDeleteIsn’t interesting how motivating a small piece of chocolate is? That was a great touch.
Cheers
Sharon
This was a great activity and I could definitely see myself using this with a grade 5 level. The researching aspect, especially if computers are used, is something that kids love to do. Simply finding this information out about an interesting subject is a great idea to keep children engaged. A team approach where everyone has specific tasks and provides structure to what can sometimes be unstructured. I enjoyed the activity and would definitely use this in my classroom.
ReplyDeleteGroup 2: Extracting info from texts.
ReplyDeleteI liked that you gathered up a variety of books and had them on display, for me, this build excitement and curiosity for the lesson, I wondered what we were going to do with the books. The strategy of assigning roles for group work is very effective for ensuring involvement from each student; it increases accountability. The word cloud is a nice idea too and Leah’s idea of having one on the wall and using it for a variety of subjects and topics is great, It can also be part of the shape of the day/month...
Nicely done.
Group 2: Reading Strategies using predicting, inferencing, imaging, and decoding of text will prove very helpful. I liked the use of expert groups; nice way if random assignment to roles. A great collaborative strategy – and the gallery walk idea is always fun. Great job all of you!
ReplyDeleteThis is a topic that I’ve worked on with both fiction and non fiction texts. With non fiction texts, I like using the class wide brainstorm, a class wide KWL or a think-pair-share strategy, just to get students ready to share and comfortable with what they want to say before they do it. When working with the text, I like using Questioning strategies-kids should generate questions they have that can be answered in the text, or using Here, Hidden and Head questions. Here questions can be found directly spelled out in the text, Hidden questions can be inferred or figured out from clues and Head questions come from student’s background knowledge. Asking questions helps student’s focus on the type of information they are trying to find. Another great way that I saw mentioned in the discussions of the presentation-assigning groups gives students a guide and a focus while researching which helps to find the pertinent information.
ReplyDelete