Why are we doing this?
Week four with my new enrichment group is already here. After polling our 8th grade teachers across subject areas, I decided our new focus would be vocabulary skills. Vocabulary skills? I thought it was a poor idea before I got started. I could envision the teeth-sucking, eye-rolling, chair-flipping and general anarchy erupting among the group.I'm thankful to report, aside of minor grumbling, my students are engaged in vocabulary-focused research and information processing. Our first week focused on prefix meanings. We worked in groups to uncover the meaning of unknown words, based on their prefix meaning. The students made educated guesses, adding them to a large chart at each table. They debated about their individual guesses, then verified against a dictionary. At the end of the week, we learned how to play Balderdash. I was excited to see the students make thoughtful definitions, based on their knowledge of prefix meanings! Not one student had played before and all seemed to enjoy the fun.
I dedicated the second week to American Revolution vocabulary. Our first day included a pre-assessment of 10 terms from the 15 we would study throughout the week. Most students didn't know the terms, but that's why we do a pre-assessment, right? I was delighted to share a Schoolhouse Rock video, No More Kings, to summarize the American Revolution in an interesting way. I asked students to pick out some vocabulary terms they recognized in the video and infer the correct definitions.
They were thrilled to spend the rest of the week in the computer lab. I used an existing Quizlet.com on American Revolution terms. They were chatty, but after I re-focused them, they used the tool to learn the terms, learn to spell them, quiz themselves and play games with the vocabulary terms. On the last day, they took a post-assessment on the Quizlet. After only three days (30 minute periods), 75% of the students earned a 100%! Many were 'competing' to see who could earn the first perfect score. Those who earned less than perfect tried again and improved each time. I wouldn't call this a lesson with deep meaning, but they do remember the Proclaimation of 1763 now.
We spent the last two weeks learning how to extract meaning from complex text. Upping the ante, I switched to chemistry terms for this process. Students learned how to search the EBSCO database by Lexile level and Boolean operators. They needed to find their term, summarize the article as related to the term, find an example (quote) of the term, then make an inferred defintition with textual evidence. Of course, they were expected to cite their resources. Each student had two terms, each requiring two sources. They will spend this week on an expidition into VoiceThread.
Voicethread is newly-acquired on a county level; I've never used it in a classroom setting. I shared with the class that I don't know how this will work on a class level, but was hoping to get their support in this new adventure. It will be sloppy. It certainly won't be perfect. We'll all make mistakes, but we'll do it together and be the model for the rest of our students at WMS. "We're alpha testing Voicethread guys, isn't that exciting?"
Some grunts and a few crooked smiles were reassurance enough for me. The first day was slightly messy, but the students and I worked past the end of class without once looking at the clock. I'll consider that a success.
