Big Time Blogging Challenge: Favorites

Today's Big Time Blogging Challenge prompt by Big Time Literacy is about favorite subjects and lessons to teach, here goes:

When people asked me about my favorites as a child, I could carry on forever talking about the reason I had multiple favorites of something.  Eyes would glaze over, or a look of regret for asking would creep across the face.  Never did it hinder me from espousing my list of favorites!

As an adult, I can't say that I've changed too much.  I have had very few moments in my classrooms that I haven't enjoyed.  I've taught a lot of lessons, and guided in a lot of inquiry that made my heart sing.  However, looking back over my eight years in education, I've picked one lesson that I've really enjoyed every time I've taught it.  I hope they are something you can be inspired by!

Martin's Big Words

I've always loved the I Have a Dream speech by MLK, Jr.  His passion is palpable as you listen to this words.  I've used the speech when talking about delivering speeches with my students.  I've used it when thinking about how they picture an improved society.  I've used it for one of my favorite lessons, big words.

When I teach the big words lesson, I always read Martin's Big Words by Doreen Rappaport (check out her other gorgeous books).  It tells the story of MLK in an accessible way, that is also engaging in upper grades.  This book introduces the concept of big words.  The students and I always have a discussion about what the author means by big words.  Does she mean length of a word?  No.  What does she mean?  She means the strength of the word, the size of the idea.  My kids have had some amazing ways to describe big words.

After this discussion, we listen to his speech.  Throughout the speech, students are listening for and writing down the big words/ideas that MLK uses as he addresses his audience.  This has been cause for some really engaged listening.  Once we've listened through, we discuss what he was saying.  What he wanted for the future.  Another amazing discussion!

We then use the words to make a word cloud.  I have the students look at their list, reflect on the speech, and choose the five biggest ideas they think he was conveying in his speech.  The students read their words aloud while I (or another student) plug the words into a world cloud generator.  I've used Wordle and Tagxedo in the past to make my clouds.  Once we've added our words and generate the cloud, we have a cloud where the big words that stuck out to the students the most are the largest.  They usually gasp with excitement when it finally shows up.  Here is an example of what we created two years ago:

Their excitement and their contemplation in this lesson are thrilling.  I usually display the word cloud on a bulletin board after I have students illustrate portions of the speech that they feel are a great visual.  

Overall it's a very powerful lesson, and I absolutely love it!

Thankful Writing Using the Triple Gold Sentence

I don't know how it goes in your classroom, but sometimes getting my kids to write can be like pulling teeth.  So many of them have such trouble with idea generation, and actually putting their thoughts together in a coherent way is next to impossible.  Don't get me wrong, some of my kids are prolific writers with a true ability to communicate.  These children, however, are few and far between.  That brings me to another thing I learned from Mr. Biffle at the WBT workshop I attended.  It's called the Triple Gold Sentence.  The triple gold sentence simply asks students, in their introductory paragraph, to name three things they can make a point about in their writing.  Each of the next three subsequent paragraphs is based on one of those points.  They would then wrap it up with a closing paragraph.

It's really not much more than the old 5 paragraph essay, but it helped remind me that not everything students write has to have some original format.  At the beginning of each year, I use The Important Book as a model for their first piece of writing.  For some reason, once that first paper is written, I drop the idea of having a "frame" for the students to use.  When I heard about the triple gold, I realized that I could help my students see that writing can be simple if you have a plan.

This week we are writing with a Thanksgiving theme.  I'm allowing my students to choose between two Thanksgiving themed prompts:

Today I talked with them about the structure their paragraph would follow:

We also prepped for our writing by making a web, here's my example:

I think that this "frame" will allow for my students to quickly produce a quality expository piece of writing.  I can't wait to share a finished piece with you all.