Next week I am teaching a 2 credit course called Assessing Language and Content Learning for K-12 English Learners. I have spent ALL of my free time lately getting ready for this class and I honestly can't wait until it's over. So far it feels like my summer break has consisted of preparing for and teaching college and I am ready to just have a break. I am currently on vacation with my family and my parents are even with us all the way from Connecticut, but my free time (when the little sneakers nap and after they go to bed at night) is consumed with creating slides for the lecture portions of my class.
I haven't written much about my college courses, but I love love love this new work. Even though the preparation is really time consuming, I really enjoy it. I love incorporating strategies and activities with adults that they can then turn around and use with their own students. I am all about making sure that they get the most bang for their buck and leave the course knowing the content but also armed with ideas of how to practically apply the content with their own students.
In the course I taught, I used interactive notebooks as a way to help my students process the course content and also as a way to model why interactive notebooks are great to use in their own classrooms. I also used several cooperative learning models from this book...
The appendices alone are well worth the cost because they detail different attention getter strategies, describe many different culturally responsive cooperative learning strategies, and list books that represent different cultures. It is an excellent resource on culturally responsive instruction with very easy to implement ideas for teachers. I provided my students with little paper slips describing the cooperative learning activities I used in class so they could create a separate section in their notebooks for teaching strategies.
A few of my favorites...
Inner Outer Circle
Line Dance
Connect Two
Give One, Get One
Sort & Mingle
Are you interested in knowing more about those cooperative learning strategies?
2 comments:
Oo, I may need to get this book! Did you find any of these helpful with the K kids? I feel like it's so hard in K but this year I did do some cooperative groups- we did expert groups and home groups where they could share about animals they were studying, and also some math topics. It was really good but could not be done at all until later in the year.
I decided this year i'm going to get a big map for the wall (a world map) and we are going to read books (maybe every Friday if I organize it that way) and mark where on our map the book takes place. I need to start making a list of books with interesting locations!
PS. I hope your class goes well next week and you get a break after that! It stinks to be doing work on vacation!
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