June 10

The thing I liked best today was the little scratch-off answer keys with the TBL. I think the students would enjoy doing that - it's kinds like winning the lottery when you scratch off the star. I like being able to hold the students individually accountable but then have them work together as well. And 500 would prob serve the whole department for the whole year. Dipity could be very interesting and useful for the students - I just need to work with it and figure it out. As far as the literacy strategies go, I found the book difficult to follow in the amount of time that we had to go over it. It seemed to me that the authors could have made it easier to understand - it was just too detailed. Having said that, the REACH strategy was prob the most useful one I looked at because I (we all, I'm sure) do it already. Resources (in print - dictionary, glossary, index) Electronics (phone or the internet) Association - making connection between the unfamiliar word and one they know already but looking at root words, suffixes, prefixes Context clues - read the sentence before and the sentence after at least 3 times before you ask for Help from a classmate or teacher. I also liked strategy 2 which was summarized by our group member as "What is it about?" and "What about it?" The text called it Telegraphic highlighting but basically, having a student summarize the meaning in a text message to a friend. I'm hopeful that I can convince my admin to let us use their phones for content purposes. Wish me luck!