Lessons we loved

This year I'm going to try to continue to highlight some of the great work that is taking place in our classrooms thorough our blog.  Here are a couple of examples of some outstanding lessons from HMS:

From Ms. Johnson--I’ve seen a couple of different classrooms use a Gallery Walk strategy for various reasons over the past couple of weeks. As you may know, a Gallery Walk allows students to explore multiple texts or images that are placed around the room. Teachers often use this strategy as a way to have students share their work with peers, examine text, or respond to a collection of quotations or images. This strategy requires students to physically move around the room, so it is often appealing to many of our kinesthetic learners. Erin James, 7th grade language arts, had students respond to each others Word Snap projects through leaving sticky notes next to each others journals. On the sticky note, the student wrote a question and/or comment for their classmate to consider or think about in terms of their project. Peer feedback is a big part of the Writing Workshop model, that Erin uses in her classes. This activity allowed students to start to practice providing feedback to their peers, while walking around the room, looking at each others project. I saw another version of a Gallery Walk in Monique Faruque’s 6th grade history class. Monique has many images placed around her room. During this Gallery Walk, she had students look at a section of images quietly, while taking notes, and writing comments and questions about various themes and characteristics they noticed. Again, students were up around the room, thinking and responding to what they saw and later they were able to discuss their thoughts within a group.
For more information and ideas about a Gallery Walk, paste this link into your web browser: http://bit.ly/1uG1tcD

From me--I stopped by the spark space last week and ran into a great lesson being taught by Todd Rooks and Pam Koury. Todd and Pam were co-teaching an activity on global citizenship. Students were working together in small groups at different stations to learn more about our world and its diverse people and cultures. At one station they were exploring this through music videos, at another they were researching another culture on-line and creating a Venn diagram comparing it and contrasting it to life in the United States, a third station had them taking a global awareness “ignorance test” and learning about world conflicts, and a final station had them researching world geography. All of this was set up through their blackboard sites and it created a highly engaging lesson for kids who likely don’t realize just how different things are throughout the world. Pam and Todd are going to be building on this lesson this year with the start of their “Global Nomads” club in which students will partner with school kids in either Afghanistan or Pakistan to develop relationships and learn about each others cultures and customs. This was a great learning experience for the kids and one that can help us build some strong relationships in the future. Great job, Todd and Pam!