Alphabet Books: Bringing Together Younger and Older Students

One of the many benefits of teaching in a school with a wide range of ages is the ability to collaborate across many grade levels. Older students are often excited to engage with younger students, just as younger students often look up to their older peers. In order to capture this natural energy and opportunity for community building, I like to create alphabet books each year about a concept or theme, then share them in with younger students either live or through circulation in the library.

This year, I had to cover everyday life during the colonial era, but had much difficulty finding sources, activities and materials appropriately challenging for middle level students. A quick Google search will make it abundantly clear how much of what is out there is for primary students. I figured that I might as well embrace the over-arching trend and use the alphabet book as a final project for this particular section.

I provided the students with several sites about colonial life, most notably PBS's Colonial House materials and Colonial Williamsburg's history site. From there, students refreshed their previous knowledge of colonial occupations (see post about classified ads project), as well as vocabulary terms and concepts. I assigned each student a few letters and they designed a page for each letter, designating a word for each letter. I scattered a few sample alphabet books about countries of the world, musical instruments and science topics around the room just to demonstrate the basic format, then let them go wild.

Between all 48 students, we were able to generate three unique books for the library, each with creative ideas for the letters. Some students tackled more abstract themes, like agriculture and slavery, while others chose figures and events, like Jamestown, John Peter Zenger and the Salem Witch Trials.

I bound the books together with a simple plastic comb binding machine and shared it with the school library. Shortly after, our librarian asked for the electronic files of the pages so that we could attempt converting it into its own ebook! Who knows, maybe younger students will soon be able to check-out our alphabet book both at the library and electronically! If this works well, we might just have a lot a ebook publishing in our future!

Evil and Treachery are Afoot!

Earlier in the year, many students read a historical fiction novel about the Salem Witch Trials in their reading classes. Now that we are studying the colonial experience in America, I realized that our textbook skips over the trials completely. I figured that we should spend some time talking about it for a few reasons: one, to provide further context for the literary experience they have already had and two, to show the cultural climate of the colonial era and the constant fears of colonial people.

To introduce the topic, I sent each student home with a "top secret" note in an envelope explaining their role for Monday's mock trial. I didn't tell them we would be having a trial as I wanted to pique their curiosity with the letters. I also told them that they were not allowed to share the contents of their letter with anyone else.

In each class, two "secret" students were selected to be witnesses against the accused, one person was the accused witch, and everyone else served as jurors. The jurors and the accused were only given vague instructions about when and where to appear and to keep their assignments secret, but the witnesses received secret directions about how to behave based on real testimony from the trials.

Images of the letters are shown below:

On trial day, I checked in with the witnesses to make sure they understood the expectations (and limitations) of what they could do during the trial. I put on my trusty judge's robe and asked the accused questions based on real tests and evidence used during the trials. The jurors observed and tracked the evidence on their checklist, shown below. At the end of the simulation, the jurors and the judge decided the fate of the accused. Needless to say, the accused were pretty much always found guilty.

Though the activity lasted only about 15 minutes -- and given the rambunctious nature of it, I wouldn't want it to last much longer -- it was a great introduction to the topic. Over the next few days, we watched a documentary video about the trials and the possible causes for the hysteria. We created a graphic organizer sorting the various potential causes including scientific, psychological, cultural and historical factors that contributed to the panic. 

All in all, I think this type of simulation and analysis was a great way to reflect on and engage in the literary experience they had earlier in the year.

Polling and Surveying to Differentiate and Inform

We all know that education is headed in a new direction -- a direction that is more interactive and more tailored to individuals, a direction with more instantaneous and long-distance feedback. A great way to reach out to students and parents is with web-based surveys and polls.

Polls and surveys can be used to accomplish the following goals:

• differentiation - You can tailor your instruction to suit the needs and wishes of your student population or discreetly collect information on student strengths and weaknesses. You can also gauge student interest and levels of experience in a particular subject matter before you even hold class the next day.
• interaction - There are few ways that are easier to engage with parents quickly and easily than asking them to participate in a simple survey or poll. Many parents are busy and removed from emails just as often, if not more often than we are. Sometimes it is difficult to get parents to commit to regular checking-in on grading sites, webpages and blogs. Many of these polling and surveying technologies allow people to engage from phones and tablets, as well as their computers and are much quicker and easier than emailing.
• organization - In the middle school years, we are often teaching organizational skills like studying, prioritizing and time management just as much as we are teaching content. As the world becomes more reliant on electronic means of timekeeping and organization, so should you! Well-timed polls and surveys can guide students through the process of developing positive habits and inform you about which strategies work best for particular learners.

Below are some sites that provide polling and surveying tools:

Poll Everywhere - This site has some free features, as well as a paid membership with more features. It allows users to create polls with text-in capabilities and online tracking.

SurveyMonkey - Customized surveys with multiple choice and open-ended questions can be blasted to email addresses and the results are compiled online in a user-friendly template.

SoGo Survey - Also a free- or subscription-based site, this tool has many customizable features and tracking tools outside the basic abilities of other sites. 

Kwik Surveys - Another free, web-based survey maker, similar to Survey Monkey.

I recently heard a discussion about polling parents and students, and I was immediately reminded of all the online survey and polling tools that I have seen over the past few years from various sources. I look forward to trying some of these tools in the near future and you can be assured I will post some data to this blog!

History Mystery - The Lost Colony of Roanoke

Between enjoying our winter break and the recent midterm exam period, it has been a little while since I have posted. Upon returning from break, we wrapped up our unit on early Spanish colonization in the Americas, then began reviewing for the midterm exam. With this week's half days and exam schedule, I have been devoting a lot of time to planning our next historical endeavor, so a blog post was not only long overdue, but much needed!

To kick off our unit on British colonization, we will begin with a "history mystery." The first section of the book briefly discusses the Roanoke Colony, but knowing my students' love for a good mystery, I thought I would expand on this opportunity with some detective work and a writing assignment.

On the first day of the unit, students were grouped into pairs and received a "dossier of evidence" about the colony in a manila folder. I created each of the documents to show a particular event in the history of the colony. With the exception of the names on the ship's log, all of the documents are fictional and I wrote them to show a particular moment in the sequence of the story based on true accounts. (Please keep this in mind if you use the documents yourself!)

The students were asked to go through the dated materials, order them by date and use their timeline sheet to create a pieced-together narrative of the events. This took 1-2 class periods depending on the reading abilities of the students. Once they had a sequence of events, they then used the template to create a narrative essay of what occurred. This essay should be fact-based in part according to the documents, but the students were given freedom with the last section to make a hypothesis about what happened to the people of the colony.

Below are some images of student work, as well as image versions of the documents:

Need to share it? Scoop it!

If you are like me, you have seen the incredibly addictive potential of Pinterest. It allows users to create different pinboards of interests, anything from home decor ideas to planning a wedding and viewing art, then "pin" links and images from the web onto a visually-appealing and easy-to-navigate board. So why am I talking about Pinterest?

I have recently discovered a similar tool, Scoop.it, that is formatted similarly to Pinterest, but it shares information, articles and sources instead of craft ideas or recipes. The posts are then organized into "magazines" instead of pinboards and the site even suggests similar sources of interest. While there is a paid subscription service available on Scoop.it, the free edition allows users to store up to five topic magazines.

You can train your students to use Scoop.it to do research and set up accounts for each student, or you can use it as a way to share your own magazines with students. Just like Twitter, Pinterest and other familiar social sharing sites, users can "follow" other users and get updates about their posts and topics. Your students can follow you and you may just find some other educators out there with similar interests to follow yourself!

Your magazines are user-friendly snippets with images instead of just lists of links. They function similar to Pinterest pinboards so some students may need less instruction on how to use them.

Image is from Seth Dixon's board entitled "History and Social Studies Education" for the Rhode Island College.

Breaking News!

Our textbook is pretty brief when it comes to describing the conquistadors and the tragic end of the Aztec and Inca empires. I wanted my students to have an opportunity to do more research and describe the events of the conquests in more detail. I decided to have them retell the story while also flexing their expository writing muscles.

With the newspaper template provided, I asked each small group to create a newspaper-like account of the events of the conquest, including pictures and some "direct quotes." (Clearly they would need to take some creative liberties here.) I gave them a checklist and grading rubric to follow and let them write.

When they were finished, we proofread the documents and printed them on 11" x 17" paper. Just for fun, we used teabags to "age" the paper to make an eye-catching display in the hallway.

I always love to get the kids writing about history, but opening up a blank word processing document can be daunting and unexciting for the kids. Writing is an important part of our interdisciplinary curriculum and I am always looking for new ways for them to express themselves in words.

Flipping on NPR!

As some of you may already be aware, I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of enthusiastic teachers a few weeks ago about the "flipped classroom" model. A few of my former colleagues and I were invited to give a presentation to teachers from cooperating schools in the Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools on the basic tenets  of flipping, as well as some use-right-away strategies for integrating it into classrooms.




Imagine my surprise this afternoon to hear a story about flipped teaching during NPR's All Things Considered. Just like so many other technological innovations of the last two decades, the idea of flipping -- which was almost completely unknown just two or three years ago -- is gaining enough traction to be covered in a major news outlet!

So, to all you flippers out there, you are truly on the cutting edge of education, and people are really beginning to take notice!