Bringing online conversations around books into the schoolhouse can prepare our students for what reading looks like today and tomorrow, says K-5 principal Matt Renwick. He highlights the development of his school’s first student digital book club.
Reflecting on Our Teaching / Two Teachers in the Room
by Elizabeth Stein · Published 06/15/2014 · Last modified 12/04/2019
Co-teaching? Take a moment to reflect about on the year just past. What action steps did you take to amplify learning for you and your students? Elizabeth Stein recalls her action steps and shares 5 questions to help co-teachers do summer planning.
We want our students to read, comprehend, and analyze text. During the past school year, history educators Aaron Block and Jody Passanisi tried annotation as a learning strategy. Here they recount how it went in the two diverse schools where they teach.
Sue Stephenson’s Kidding Around is overflowing with ideas for teachers who would like to add more humor and fun to their classrooms and want to help kids understand how they can promote their own happiness, says reviewer Jennifer Underwood. Also available in Spanish.
Summer is upon us and we hope you’ll soon be able to settle in with a stack of books you’ve been looking forward to reading. Some fiction perhaps. And then a couple of books to grow on. Here are a dozen we’ve selected from among our MiddleWeb reviews.
STEM By Design / STEM Summer Activities
by Anne Jolly · Published 06/01/2014 · Last modified 12/10/2019
How to STEM the summer learning slide? MiddleWeb’s Anne Jolly offers a great collection of ideas and resources that can help parents and educators keep kids tuned into math, science and engineering topics until the school doors open again this fall.
When sixth grade ELA teacher Kevin Hodgson’s students were asked to help pilot new paper circuitry learning tools developed at the MIT Media Lab, they chose to illuminate haiku poems about light. The technology draws on the work of Jie Qi, a mechanical engineer and MIT doctoral student known for her work with electrified paper.
The topic of dictionaries came up in assorted conversations in the past few weeks, reminding Kevin Hodgson both of the power of those esteemed books of words as symbols of thought and scholarship, and the ways in which technology is completely altering the ease and means of how we find information when we need it.
Too much close reading is boring, say Mike Fisher & Danielle Hardt, as students comb through fiction, constantly analyzing lots of text. Ask them to read and write digital microstories. They’ll build evaluation & synthesis skills and have some fun.
Sixth grade teacher Kevin Hodgson uses What’s the Big Idea?, a philosophy website for middle schoolers, to guide his students through a close reading of movie and TV clips, exploring ethical questions and examining filmmaker’s intentions.
