Friends vs Friendly, Free Markets and Five Day Weeks

The first day back from a vacation can be a challenge. Waking up to an alarm, refocusing attention and being aware of others all come back into play. And the same is probably true for students! This year I've been using those first days back to work on light-lifting, low stress but teachable lessons on empathy, kindness and reestablishing relationships. We did our improv work after summer vacation to work on our listening skills, after the holiday break we worked on the kindness pledge and this time around we did some direct instruction on empathy. I used a lesson from Tolerance.org to help. I explained to my students that you can be friendly to anyone and that doesn't mean you have to be friends. Before we got to the role-playing part we focused on the 3 keys to developing empathy- 1) Put yourself in an empathetic mindset. 2) Be an active listener. 3) When following up, ask "you questions" rather than making "I statements". Students role-played different situations and worked on their empathy skills. We closed with a whole group circle exit task where we shared out big takeaways and things we could go out into the day practicing that show empathetic thinking.

From there we started our unit on economics. Economics is tricky because there are so many unit specific vocabulary words. I gave kids a handout that we used some literacy strategies to read aloud, take notes on and then answer some comprehension questions around. I explained that the goal wasn't vocab mastery but starting to familiarize with terms like producer,  consumer, market economy, supply & demand, etc. Friday we read a Newsela article on the different types of economies in the world. Newsela is great because it allows students to adjust the reading level of the article, highlight words, and take a check-in at the end to make sure they understand what they just read. From the teacher dashboard I can see what reading level each student selected and what words they highlighted. I asked them in particular this time to highlight words in red that they still didn't know so I can build a vocab wall in the room. The big piece of understanding students needed was to learn what resources are being talked about when describing the market of a certain country. Starting tomorrow, students will pick a country from anywhere in the world and research their markets with the goal being to make a claim as to whether they are capitalist, communist or socialist markets by the end of the week.

Reflections on team teaching 18th Century Vermont

Vacations are earned! That's something I know. But they are earned by teachers and students alike, especially after completing a whirlwind unit like we just did.  For the month of February the ELA teacher on my team, Joy Peterson, and I did our first integrated humanities unit. There was an adjustment period for us as teachers- opening the wall between our two classrooms, collaborating on an hourly basis and resetting norms for the big room during non-academic times. So I have to assume the students took some time to settle in as well!

I really enjoyed the experience. It was great to see the flexibility and having multiple experts in the room to refer students to so they could really get the support they needed. I think a true example of personalized learning! Need more research options or random facts about Vermont? Go see Mr. Bailey. Need some support laying out your presentation and properly citing sources? Go see Ms. Peterson.

We started the 3 week unit with a week of stations (documented throughout on our team Instagram feed), where each day students were exposed to different aspects of 18th Century Vermont. People/Settlement/Conflict was the first station, Agriculture/Food the second, Industry the third and Growing Up in Vermont the fourth. We had students keeping exit tasks books throughout as well as self-assessing their focus and interest levels to see how the numbers for focus change as the number for interest in the topic changed. From there they brainstormed personal research projects and used this padlet to research. I was really proud of the focus we intentionally set out for Native American life during that century. A lot of students took an interest in that and did projects with that topic.

The Learning Targets we were assessing the work on was the Humanities target of "Speaking & Presenting" and the Social Studies target of "Culture". I did a lesson with direction instruction around Speaking and Presenting using the Highlights magazine cartoon of Goofus & Gallant. Joy and I created indicators for the target, doing some translating of the language within the target to be more 5th/6th grade vocab friendly. In the mini-lesson, I broke tables groups out to create a Goofus & Gallant using just one part of the target (highlighted in this google doc).

This past week was for presentations, and I can confidently speak for Joy and myself in saying how blown away we were by the content and delivery across the board. I'm so excited to be putting in a variety of examples in below. I'm also pleased that a few students are going to extend their experience by entering their presentations in Vermont History Day in April.

Now it's time to do my part as an 18th Century Vermonter and wait for the weather to cooperate so I can start sugaring season. We run it old fashioned- buckets, lines and a wood fire. An ode to those who've come before. Enjoy the student examples below:

Triumph & Tragedy in 18th Century Vermont

Morgan Horses

Potash

18th Century Vermont Life

This group visited the 1 room schoolhouse as part of their project

The Work of a Fainting Goat

When I'm home at night with my family, my girls (ages 10 & 5), we like to unwind after dinner watching some funny videos. The go to, first request is always fainting goats. For those of you unfamiliar to these animals, see the video below (be prepared to play on loop and have a good laugh):

There's nothing medically wrong when they fall, it's just when it is time to do something, they fall over. Like my youngest, Sophie says "It's like they're plastic!"

For me this made sense when thinking about wrapping up our most recent Social Studies unit which focused on the inquiry question of "Are Freedoms Free?" To tackle this important question we looked at the Constitution, Bill of Rights and all 27 Amendments. When putting together the summative assessment the goal was clear for kids. Unlike the fainting goat, their work needed to stand on it's own merits.

To accomplish this, the sharing out was round-robin format. Students left their work at the table why circulating to other presentations. They were not allowed to stand and explain what their peers were reading. As we work through the CVSD Transferable skills, we have already done a lot of work around Claim and Evidence. This unit was scored on Reasoning & Analysis. Their ability to look back at all the work we did over the unit and analyze how it supported their claim.

The way in which the work was presented was open-ended. I told students to play to their strengths. I received a lot of different formats. Slideshows, posters- both digital and on paper, some videos, a skit or two and even a poem were all part of the things shared out. I was more than impressed with how these turned out and learning students demonstrated. I've included some examples below.

On a related but separate note- I had a great initial brainstorm meeting on Wednesday with Emily Rinkema to start mapping out next year. My big takeaways was that I will be using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the spine of my curriculum. My homework for Emily is to create some graphic to represent that as a curriculum map. I'll be building a website to house the work for next year. The idea will be to integrate the C3 National Social Studies Standards with the Global Goals and work down through the district transferable skills and learning targets to be the critical thinking skills needed to address solutions to the goals all while using the lens of history to teach it. One theme I'm considering for the year is "Using the past to solve the present". Let me know what you think of that!

Here are some of the examples. Two are from 5th grade girls and the other from a 6th grade boy:

Poem

Slideshow

Essay

Dreams for next year

I'm not even sure if I remember how to write a blog post it's been so long, but I'll carry on in the hopes that it's like riding a bike. Apologies if it comes across disjointed but I'm going to simply share out my ideas for two reasons- the first is that by publishing them I'll build some accountability for myself to implement them and the second is creating a place to come back to when I forget what any of them are!

In an effort to see these ideas come to light I'm already setting up times to meet with our school's PBL coach Emily Rinkema to start laying the groundwork. I know for me, one of my weaknesses is sustaining big ideas unless I've set routines and structures in place ahead of time. The chaos of the school year just takes over and I go in to staying a float mode rather than swimming ahead.

As I'm looking over my first year of teaching Social Studies, I've been pleased with the level of discourse and thinking that's been produced using an inquiry based design approach. The course I took really helped shape my ability to design units where students think critically about topics. I want to keep that in place while adjusting the curriculum map itself to focus on the following areas:

• Using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the core curriculum experience
• Engage students with real world collaboration opportunities with community members to help their work in these goals
• Begin to use Empatico to connect globally to classrooms around the world as a way to promote empathy, tolerance and understanding
• Continue to improve the PLP process to have students set goals based on the transferable skills our district has set out

• Finally, in my own professional journey I'd like to do this (blog) more and include student voice  by having them use tools like WeVideo and OnlineVoiceRecorder to have them create vlogs and podcasts.

I'm planning on doing another post this week to highlight the amazing learning that took place on the unit we just finished on the Constitution and Bill of Rights where we answered the question- "Are Freedoms Free?"

Comments and feedback greatly appreciated!

Jared

AMLE travels for me, students show great perseverance.

What a long strange trip it's been...

I left Sunday afternoon to travel to Philadelphia with my coworkers Joy and Amy to attend the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) annual conference. What an awesome few days of professional development and taking in the sights and sounds of a great city too. I will share out some of the resources, but I don't want to break the internet by posting all of them on this blog. I did tweet out every session I went to. Another resource would be to search the hashtag #AMLE2017.

The sessions I focused on related to project based learning in math (shocker), middle school transitions, and supporting active learners. I'm really needing to introduce brain breaks more during class and I'm now using the site http://www.motivatingthemiddle.org/ to do so. As the presenter said (and she was awesome) "if the butt goes numb, the brain goes dumb". Yesterday we did an activity called "Egg, chicken, cow, human" and the kids loved it!

One of my favorite graphics from the project based strands is below:



I also really enjoyed the Tarrant Presentation about the intersection of project based learning & proficiency based learning. Their whole presentation can be found here.

Joy, Amy and I also took some time to explore Philadelphia. What a great an interesting city! We posted as many pictures as we could to the Sterling Instagram account to keep the kids in the loop as much as possible while we were gone.

The students did an amazing job working for the 3 days I was out. I had kids emailing me pictures of their work daily, and spent a lot time checking in and answer questions via email as well. It's been great to read their blogs this week and see how much learning took place.

Next week 6th graders will begin presenting their dance planning projects to the other teachers on the team while also beginning the early work of designing their new dream rooms. 5th graders will be wrapping up our decimal and place value unit by doing some shopping.

Wrapping Up 1st Project, starting next round!

It's been too long blog! My students have been more active on their blogs than I have been. My 6th graders have finished their dance planning project and I could not be happier with the results. They all were invested in the process and the math learning looks to have come through as well. I decided to give them the same end of unit assessment that they would have taken in previous years so I can have some cross year comparison within my classes, but also it's the same assessment the other teams in the building give too. So I'll also have some current year cross team data to look at as well. Here's a photo of the 6th grade design teams practicing their presentations before presenting to teachers in the next few weeks.

I decided to not follow through on the 5th grade project I had planned. It was too cumbersome to pull off early in the year and I really needed to have the community connections established before seeing it out. I did like the premise of the project and hope to attempt it again next year. While doing more direct instruction I was able to keep working on group norms for the classes and I've noticed that has really paid off. The 5th graders are really working well in their design teams, and even when we switched to new groups this week it didn't take a lot of work. The group is going to start doing decimal and place value work. I'm going to introduce a mini-project for that and I'm still researching what to do. Here are some more photos I've taken over the past couple of weeks as I've not been blogging featuring some looks at our new (temporary) digs while our space is being renovated. Enjoy!

I'm excited from here to be heading to Philadelphia on Sunday for the AMLE national conference (American Middle Level Educators). I plan on going to the Project Based Learning sessions while also looking at some bigger picture items for the team and my classroom practices in general. My goal is to do a blog post from AMLE specific to the conference and feature some resources. I'll also be tweeting out (@jwbvt).

Rolling along on our projects and I attend a PLP Fair

This week was a productive week both in and outside of the classroom.

6th grade students spent the early part of the week continuing to explore fractions. We did a series of exit tasks surrounding the different fraction operations. I've been compiling those to determine the individual supports I can offer for those needing some more work. The end of the week for them brought project work time. I'm continuing to be blown away by the level of work and team work that these kids show. Their scale models are really coming together! Wednesday I went to the front office and brought back to the classroom one of the real construction drawings being used during our building renovation. Kids really looked at that with a careful eye before heading back to their individual drawings.

This photo is when the kids called down Joe Carr, who oversees the dances. They wanted to know where they could place items, how many kids came, etc. He was a good sport!

In 5th grade, students are working really hard for learning the formula for area of rectangle. We finally got to where we understand that area of a rectangle is length times width! From there, we began to extend that to finding the surface area of a 3-dimensional shape. Students worked together exploring how to create a formula for that as well.

Every Friday is a reflection day, I created a 5 question reflection guide with sentence starters for kids to think about as the blogged. We are using kidblog to do our writing. Student blogs can be viewed at the following link: https://kidblog.org/class/mr-baileys-math/posts