I’ve mentioned elsewhere teachers who have used blogging as a modern day platform for their Concept/Question Board. Alice Mercer has now re-imagined the Concept/Question Board using VoiceThread, an online digital storytelling platform. Here, students record their voices asking questions and telling what they know about the coming unit. See VoiceThread Online Concept/Question Boards: Third Grade: …
Tag: unit opener
Making A New Nation: Five Ideas for a Unit Opener
The American Revolution Unit contains several wordy stories of American History. The goal of the unit opener should be to assess prior knowledge and plant the seeds of recognition of a few key characters and motivations so that the following stories are comprehensible and relevant. Unit Opener Objective Students will be able to explain …
Unit Opener Planning Week is Back
Back in October, I hosted a Unit Opener planning week for Open Court units #2. It resulted in some terrific ideas being posted by web site visitors and fellow bloggers and those ideas are now linked to from the unit opener pages of those units. As teachers at different schools have different pacing, editions, and …
Bill Pinkney’s Back
The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney is now available on DVD. This is a fantastic film which brings the story to life. It’s long. I would not play it in its entirety in one sitting but would play a piece every day as you read the story. Some teachers find it objectionable that …
City Wildlife and the Songwriting Process
Sandra Bacall, teacher and singer, created this film with her classroom about a song they wrote together for the City Wildlife Unit. At the end of the song, students talk about the songwriting process and compare it to the traditional writing process. Using music appeals to students’ different learning modalities and increases engagement.
Third Grade – City Wildlife Unit Openers
My favorite one-stop shop for opening this unit is Cornell University’s Urban Bird Studies web site. All resources are free though they request a donation if they send you materials. This site has films you can watch with your students and asks students to be urban bird watchers in their own community and submit data …
How to Plan a Unit Opener
by Mathew Needleman Let’s begin our week of unit opener planning by making sure we’re all on the same page and share a common rationale and understanding of what an effective unit opener is. What is a Unit Opener? A unit opener is the Open Court Reading name for what is commonly known as an …
Unit Opener Planning Week is Coming 10/15
Please join me on the blog for Unit Opener Planning Week, the week of October 15-20, a week spent planning and reflecting on possible unit opener ideas for the next unit. Here’s the schedule for this blog (entries posted at 7:30 AM PST): Monday 10/15 Best Practices for Unit Openers/Anticipatory Sets Tuesday 10/16 Virtual Guest …
A Game for Teaching Cooperation and Competition
by Francie Kugelman I place the students in groups of 4, with one strong math student in each group. The directions are passed out, along with the two charts the students are to round to the nearest whole number. The students are given the directions and chart paper to write their answers. This project is …