This year I decided to utilise three new resources I had purchased late last year. My goal was to engage my students and turn what I considered the boring stuff into fun and informative. I knew I needed a way to collect evidence of their learning, but didn't want to create more work for myself and bore my students. So far they have been a great success. They are engaging, relevant and make learning the basics fun!
Interactive Maths Journal:
I began these last year with my class towards the end of term three. It is the resource I recommend and show off the most to my colleagues. You teach a lesson on a skill, students create an interactive manipulative and then they show their own evidence of learning. I am excited to add regular entries to their journals. They will be able to take these with them to high school or keep them at home to remind them of the concepts they have learnt throughout the year. This year we have set up the journals with their title pages, table of contents, evidence of learning criteria and then their first entry (2014 goal setting).
Interactive Reading Journal:
In our class this year we have been studying the novel 'Wonder'. I wanted a way to teach reading skills to the whole class that I could then touch on during guided reading rotations and during our novel study time. Our first entry was on 'Internal Vs. External Conflict'. We created the interactive manipulative and recorded down the information. We then looked at two YouTube clips from 'Toy Story 3' that showed internal and external conflict. This helped my students to create their own links to the concept. To consolidate this we read 'The Stone' by Lloyd Alexander. It is a short story that my class loved! They highlighted the internal and external conflict that occurred in the story and recorded this down as their evidence of understanding.
We touched on this the next day during our literacy circle and then looked at types of conflict. We looked at:
- Man Vs. Man (External)
- Man Vs. Nature (External)
- Man Vs. Society (External)
- Man Vs. Self (Internal)
This was harder concept for the students to grasp but after the activities they showed a deeper understanding. We created the interactive manipulative and once again recorded down our information. The students then cut out a number of scenarios and placed them under the headings they thought fit. We then discussed each scenario and how they fit into the appropriate category. Our next entry will be on story devices (flashback, suspense, cliffhanger and foreshadowing).
Interactive Writing Journal:
We have only just begun our writing journals. When I looked at our writing samples I noticed that my students needed a deeper understanding of literacy devices, grammar and strategies to self assess and improve their own writing. We have completed our first entry on 'Dead Words'. We discussed words we want to 'bury' from our writing during our literacy circle. We talked about overusing adjectives and being lazy with our vocabulary. Their writing journals will be used as a guide to improve their writing and to teach them sentence structures, paragraphing and the correct formats for the different genres of writing.
Overall I think our Interactive Journals have been a huge success. My students are excited to add to them and the concepts we are covering are relevant and purposeful to our learning.
