Better World Ed Lesson Plans

I've taught several lessons now using the content from Better World Ed.

They have a repository of videos, stories that accompany the videos, and lesson plans to match.  The videos are about people from different parts of the world.

I've taught 2 lessons in the last couple months as well as one back in December.

The most recent lesson was about the story "Ghani Grows Rice".
A quick run down of how I ran the lesson for 2nd/3rd graders.

• I showed a little of the video and then stopped and asked students to brainstorm what they thought the main idea of the video would be.  Answers included plants, forest, water, farmer. 
• I read a little of the story and pairs of students shared their experience with rice--different varieties of rice they had seen or tried and their opinions about them.
• We went over vocabulary words sow and yield and talked about weather here in California and how drought has impacted their lives.
• I tied this part in to 2nd grade social studies and the concept that price rises when there's less supply.
• We watched the rest of the video.
• We talked abut the amount of water mentioned in the story.  I related 1 kg of patty to be about 1 pineapple or what would fill a 1 L water bottle (which I showed). 
• Math: the fraction of water saved with the new growing system.
• We related overall water need to school-size swimming pools.
• Students did some math to determine how much rice their family eats each year (measuring cups were helpful) and then how much water would be needed for the amount of rice their family might eat in a year.
• They did a partner project at the end to brainstorm ways they could conserve water in their own life.

In February I taught a lesson about the story "I am Touhid".

• --Start with a reminder to students of books I had read aloud (Blue Tarp School, Malala's Pencil, Beatrice's Goat, The Water Princess) that were part of our Change For Good unit.  We reviewed on a map where those countries were located.

• --We watched the "I am Touhid" video until he starts to fix the fuse

• --Discussion about the problem that just happened, how that has happened to me and what I have to do to fix the problem in my house in California, and has that ever happened to their family and if so what did they do to solve the problem.

• --I read the story through "joyful lives" and tell them there's info about a problem that we'll return to later

• --I finished reading the story, also skipping the specifics about $, telling them there's a 2nd problem we'll return to later

• --I showed the rest of the video

• --I mentioned that in US it's a law that kids have to go to school, students talked about why that's a law

• --Students talked about character traits they say in Touhid and evidence, the themes from the video that were also in the above books, and similarities between themselves and Touhid

• --Students individually wrote a reflection about theme, one of Touhid's character traits with evidence, and what motivated him

• --Pairs of students worked together to determine how much it cost to go to school for a year (2nd problem from earlier in the lesson)

• --Pairs of students worked together to re-arrange Touhid's schedule so he could spend time with the elderly (1st problem from earlier in the lesson)

Student Goal Setting and Reflection

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present at SV CUE.  I talked about the importance of student goal setting and reflection as well as my ongoing journey to include this in my students' day and improve the quality of their reflections.  The goal not being better reflections for the sake of better reflections, but better reflections as a tool leading to better learning.

If you'd like to see the slides you can find them here.

Epic! for Readers Workshop Information Book Clubs

I've enjoyed Lucy Calkins Writing Workshop model so much that this year I decided to switch my reading block to reading workshop.  My school has not purchased Lucy Calkins' curriculum, so I've been creating the teaching points and lesson sequence on my own.

Having access to Epic! and all the amazing fiction and non fiction books in their FREE school library has been incredibly helpful for this switch.

My students and I are just about to start an information book club unit that will last for the next 6 weeks.  I gave the students several general topics and asked them to vote on the one they wanted to learn about during this unit.  The winning topic was habitats/ecosystems.  To start, each student will choose a habitat they want to focus on, and students who have chosen the same habitat will form a book club.

I've been busy creating collections of books for each habitat so that when we have reading time the students will be focused on reading rather than searching for books on their own.  This will also ensure that when book clubs meet they will have a common set of resources that they'll be discussing.  For each habitat I found 6-9 books that span the range of 1st-4th grade reading level, thus meeting the needs of all the readers in the class.

Here's the collection I created for the wetlands habitat.

Initially students will spend a few days doing book walks and diving deeper into learning about their chosen habitat.  After that, each student in the group will choose a specific subtopic to research in depth, becoming the expert in their book club on that topic.  It will be their job to find facts and photos about their subtopic.

Following review lessons about copyright, plagiarism and citing sources, students will gather information, either by taking notes on paper or in an app on their iPad, or by annotating screenshots from the books.

Here's an annotation a student did when research US symbols.

Having Epic! as a resource will make it easy for my students to be successful readers and researchers as we start this new reading workshop unit.  I won't need to visit multiple libraries to gather enough paper books, students won't have to wait their turn to read a book that I only have 1 copy of, and I won't have to spend a lot of money on book purchases.