Literacy Center Resources
1/26/2018
After lots of hard work and dedication, we finished our resources for the Alaska Literacy Program and I delivered them on Thursday. We were able to make 5 sets of reusable flash cards and sets of reusable practice tests for their center that students working towards the passing the citizenship test can use to study. This turned in to an incredible project that led the kids to be able to discuss different resources that would be helpful in an unfamiliar area or with a language barrier. We decided that we will continue to stay in touch with their center and will update resources when we can or offer different help if the need arises. Science ProjectsIn Science, students are completing their comprehensive project focused on the uneven distribution of natural resources around the world. They have been reading, working in stations doing investigations, and using their ELA time to do persuasive writing about different environmental concerns over the past two weeks. For this project, students were given a list of 11 different ways they could show their understanding and application of the material covered. The choices were given point values of 5-15 based on complexity and time commitment, so students could mix and match the one's they wanted to do. Some of the choices were to write an essay, build a board game, create an explanation with technology, or to show an artistic summary of a complete station. Giving the students the choice in how they wanted to show their mastery of the standards was an excellent way for me to see what they see as their true strengths and interests. Some students really focused on the writing assignments while others went above the 25 point requirement because they had more fun creating the games and tangible resources. All of the projects will be due and presented on Tuesday, January 30th. Thesis StatementsWe used our ELA time to focus on thesis statements as a continuation of our persuasive argument unit. As a class, we went through a list of topics that they could easily and quickly form an opinion on to practice writing the actual statement. The focus of this exercise was not to research detailed reasons to support their statements, but to look at formatting a thesis and including details about topics they already know.
After each student wrote their own, we combined them by topic so we could see different ways that they were written. By the end of this class, students were doing a great job of verbalizing which statements were excellent and the pieces that were missed in others. We spent a lot of time laughing through this because some of the topics were rather silly, but it was a productive way to show the key pieces of a thesis statement and starting a proper argument. |
AuthorCharlotte Woodside recently moved to Alaska from Central Texas. This is her 8th year teaching middle school. Archives
April 2018
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