Learning Strategies

As a beginning teacher there is SO MUCH you have to create! You don't have lessons, activities, and books that you need. Luckily, I was blessed with the opportunity to do my student teaching in 5th grade, however there was still so much additional ideas I still needed. And so, as any 21st century person would do, I turned to the internet. I don't know how teachers LIVED before this incredible device?!?! Hours of searching later, produced many great lessons, some borrowed from other great teachers, some created off of others ideas, and some coming from my own imagination. Here are a few I enjoyed ...

 A great idea I found in Mailbox Magazine for making text connections

Students create their connection on a piece of paper and connect them under the correct category to create a paper chain.

 A follow up to the previous activity found at readwritethink.org that allows the students to make the connection in their own reading journals during independent reading.

 My own personal creation (due to the improper grammar of my room *grin*) - I made "calling them out" a game and the kids had fun with this ALL year. We added MANY more improper words and combination throughout the year. The kids always got a thrill when they would read things and it would be wrong or people in a video would say one of our "NO WORDS" :)

 Also found in a Mailbox Magazine we created this poster so students could share good titles of different genre's they'd read throughout the year.

 A collaboration of different writing techniques I found during my internet searches, as well as some of my own in our writing workshop corner.

 A VERY neat and VERY easy way to help kids write fun poetry (great for hesitant writers). I actually found this particular piece - and the idea - at an art show. Instead of writing your own poem, you take pages from old books (preferably descriptive literature) and find words that create a poem all on their own, then you use white out and cover all the other words creating a {POEM} The kids LOVED this :)

 Our school hallway St. Patty's day display - the students made collages from magazine pictures of the word "LUCK". Turned our really cute!

During each of my social studies units, I have the students read books on the topic as either a SS center or a literacy center. I have them use di-cuts (preferably matching the subject) to write down interesting facts, tidbits, or important information on. I found these particular ones at Dollar Tree in the teacher section.

 

For purposes of learning history, time lines are a MUST!  If you teach any type of sequential history (American, State, World, Country, etc.) You MUST have a way in which your students can create a flowing story in their minds of the jumble of events you are throwing their direction. This particular time line hung above our whiteboard throughout the whole year. It was a "class" time line and we added information to it as we went along. However, I also have my students keep their own time line in their notebooks which we update periodically.

A display of Information Text during our "informational genre" study. I believe it is important to have a classroom library as well as a school library - when we change gene's I always change the genre display where students can "check" the special genre books out to read.