Building Sentences

04/13/2012

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This week my colleagues asked me to help students with their understanding of parts of speech. What an abstract concept this is! To kick off the lesson, I decided to use boxes of different sizes as a metaphor. I went to my local department store and begged several boxes of varying sizes that would fit within each other. On the top of each box I taped a piece of plastic that I had cut from a page protector. This allowed me to write on the box, and be able to reuse them for another part-whole concept.  

  1. On the biggest box I wrote STORY
  2. On two boxes inside this I wrote PARAGRAPH
  3. On three boxes inside each of these I wrote SENTENCE
  4. Inside these I placed colored unifix cubes to represent words. Unifix cubes, usually used as a math manipulative, are wonderful for building sentences because you can color code the words by part of speech.
  5. Inside the Unifix cubes I placed tiny alphabet beads that spelled words.

All eyes were on the boxes as we slowly unpacked the concept! The students really grasped the idea that each 'thing' was a part of a bigger thing, and that each whole had smaller parts.

My boxes will be easy to wipe off and use again for another concept in the future.
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Props and Predictions

02/23/2012

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Today I had the wonderful opportunity to co-teach English with Mary. Students are in the middle of reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. To start class with a novel hook, I showed them an orange and asked them to predict what an orange might have to do with the play. We were greeted by some puzzled expressions at first, but then students began to buzz with each other about possibilities. I tossed the orange around the room and we listened to their ideas.



“If you stab an orange, juice will spurt out, like when they stabbed Caesar and he bled out.”

“You can peel back the skin of the orange, kind of like they were trying to peel back the layers of power in Rome.”

“In The Godfather, an orange always meant someone was going to die. In JC there are predictions of someone dying.”

“If you go deeper than the skin you see something different. This is like the characters, one thing on the surface, but different deep down.”

Neuroscientist Judy Willis (yes, I am a fan!) tells us that novelty grabs attention and helps information to get past the RAS (Reticular Activating System.) Once information makes it past the RAS, the brain begins to make predictions. We can direct this impulse to support our content objectives! Students were engaged and thinking in creative, connected ways.  So grab a food item from your kitchen or pantry and give it a try!

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