The Week of September 3-7
"Success comes to those who hang in, who get back up after being knocked down again and again, and who try harder and longer."
Thomas R. Hoerr
How are you developing resilience and tenacity....what I call grit... in your students? According to Hoerr,grit is a common trait among people who are successful in life. Teach your students the value of grit this year as you push them out of their comfort zones, and teach them not to give up in the face of failure but to enthusiastically try again .
Teaching Academic Vocabulary
The Common Core uses many cognitive verbs that signal the type of mental operations students are asked to perform. There are five steps to teaching these verbs....
1. Provide an explanation and an example of how the term is used and what it means in the context of the subject area. For instance, the term, analyze, means different things in different subject areas. In language arts, when you analyze the development of a theme, you find parts of the text where the author builds the theme and examine how these parts work together to communicate the theme. In math, when you analyze a shape, you look at its sides, angles, size, dimensions, etc.
2. Have students record their own explanations and examples of the term. Have the students keep a vocabulary notebook.
3. Have the students record a picture, symbol, or graphic representation that reminds the student(s)the meaning of the term.
4. Once students have recorded one term in their notebook, teach other terms in that category... For example, if the term is "evaluate,", other related terms are assess, check, critique, evaluate, judge.
5. Finally, as students use the academic vocabulary, have them update their vocabulary notebooks with definitions and examples that are "sharper".
Please pick up a list of "cognitive verbs" from my mailbox outside of my office.
Have a great week!!!!
