Category: Instructional design

Posted in Collaborative learning, Competition, Differentiated instruction, Games, Instructional design, Kinesthetic, Learning styles, Math, Student engagement, Test prep

Chapter 66: On Target

Posted on by redforkhippie

I have a love-hate relationship with school breaks. On the one hand, they’re a chance to decompress, catch up on some projects at home, do some advance planning, and spend some time with my dogs. On the other hand, they’re a monumental disruption that distracts the kids and makes it extremely difficult to get them to concentrate on anything long enough to learn.

This ain’t my first rodeo, so I got wise this year and didn’t bother attempting to teach anything new the week before spring break. Instead, I devoted the entire week to activities meant to reinforce concepts the kids had already mastered: a catch-up day on Monday to help my frequent absentees backfill those last few holes in the gradebook ahead of report cards; a doodle-by-numbers activity I pulled off Teachers Pay Teachers to review angle-sum rules; an Easter-egg hunt with math problems inside the eggs and a key that required the kids to find the correct answers in order to get their next clue; and a low-prep darts game we’ve played a time or two in the past.

The game is very simple. Get yourself a ball-darts game and a bunch of math problems over whatever the kids have been learning recently. I bought the dartboard you see in the picture from Amazon earlier this year. The kids like it because the board and the balls all light up.

Divide the class into two teams (if you have an odd number of kids, choose one to be your scorekeeper) and have them form two lines. The first kid on Team 1 throws a ball at the dartboard to determine the point value for the first question. Kid 1 can confer with the rest of the team about the answer to the question, but Kid 1 is the only person allowed to answer it. If Team 1 misses, Team 2 has a chance to rebound before throwing the ball and answering a question of their own.

I like this game a lot because it’s high-engagement; gives struggling learners a chance to practice with help from their classmates; meets the kids’ social needs; and requires no prep beyond downloading a worksheet and printing it out to use as your question bank. (Protip: If you need a bunch of questions quickly, search Teachers Pay Teachers for your concept + “drill” to find practice problem sets.)

If you want to send your engagement through the roof, keep a supply of dollar-store prizes on hand and award a small prize to the winning team. (For my middle-schoolers, I’ve found candy and anything dinosaur-themed to be popular prizes, but your mileage may vary.)

Posted in Hands-on activities, Instructional design, Kinesthetic, Learning styles, Math, Student engagement

Chapter 63: The Force Is Strong With These

Posted on by redforkhippie

My eighth-graders used a lightsaber to help them remember the difference between positive and negative integers. I threw some simple addition and subtraction problems on the board and had them take turns walking along the number line, pointing with the lightsaber, as they counted off numbers to solve the problems. Everything to the left of zero was the Dark Side, and everything to the right was the Light Side. The Star Wars analogy was silly, but they had fun with it, and it helped them remember the difference.

If you teach math, and you don’t already have one, I highly recommend making a number line that the kids can see from across the room and posting it on the wall above your whiteboard. Physically walking along the number line really helps the kids get their heads around integers.

Posted in Advice for rookies, Cross-curricular instruction, Differentiated instruction, Instructional design

Chapter 60: A Word of Caution

Posted on by redforkhippie

Good grief. Has it really been two years since I last updated? Sorry about that; I plead grad school and licensure dossier.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time mentoring younger teachers, coordinating cross-curricular projects, and working with prefabbed materials to try to save time, streamline my planning, optimize lessons for remote delivery, etc., etc., etc. Here is a thing I know:

You cannot trust prefabbed materials.

Every prepackaged curriculum has gaps. Even a comprehensive package will lose pieces over time. If your district has been using a particular curriculum for more than a year or two, it is probably safe to assume that you are missing at least one significant tool. Maybe your teacher’s manual never found its way to you and is instead on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard.” Maybe the district decided to save money by skimping on consumables, so you don’t have a full class set of whichever workbook you’re supposed to have. Maybe the program itself ignores the importance of differentiation, so it won’t work for the kid who is reading three years below grade level or can’t remember his multiplication tables or transferred in from another state in the middle of a semester or [insert obstacle here].

Most of us are aware of this problem, so we supplement. If we have time, we sit down, comb through the next unit, figure out what’s missing, and create materials to fill the gaps. If we don’t have time, we grab whatever we can find at Lakeshore Learning or Teachers Pay Teachers or wherever we like to buy stuff for our classrooms, and we poke it into the holes in hopes that it will keep the wind from howling in through the cracks.

It’s OK to do that. You are under zero obligation to create every single assignment from scratch. But if you’re going to use prefabbed materials, you owe it to your students to curate those materials carefully and make sure that A.) they actually do what you need them to do, and B.) they don’t give conflicting directions or information.

This time of year is crazy, and we’re all in survival mode. I get it. I do. I’m writing this post because I started a cross-curricular project with three colleagues and completely failed to vet their materials before tossing them on Google Classroom. My students and I are now living with the ensuing chaos, and I have no one to blame but myself. Reading all the materials and talking to colleagues about how to reconcile the conflicts would have completely eliminated this problem and spared my kids a lot of stress. They deserve better from me, and you can bet they’ll get it next time.

Learn from my mistakes. Vet your materials, and make modifications as needed. Investing a few minutes now can save you and your kids a lot of time and heartache later.