Unit Planning

Your LLED 320 Integrated Unit Plan task is due on Tuesday, 6 March 2012.  We’ll spend some class time on that day sharing what you’ve developed with interested colleagues.  So, to that end, please bring a hard copy of your task or a laptop with an electronic copy of it to Tuesday’s session.

Lit Circles Comprehension Strategies (continued) – Ideagrams

We wrapped up the Brownlie webcast (found here.  It’s the 33:49 minute one).  The last 8 minutes of her presentation focus on the Ideagrams culminating activity.  In essence, it’s a visual display that represents a theme.

Faye’s webcast was in 2004 and, with the advent of Web 2.0, you might find that web-based programs such as Glogster, an online poster maker, would work very well as a vehicle for presenting an Ideagram.

Here’s a handout to support the Ideagram topic:

• Ideagram Handout

Lit Circle Readings TOP 10 Lists

Top 10 Tips for Teaching Lit Circles lists in hand, we used the Inside/Outside Circles strategy to process the content of this weeks readings from Student Diversity, Chapter 7: Lit Circles and Chapter 9: Integrated Unit.  Also, we discussed some strengths, challenges, and questions related to Lit Circles.

Adrienne Gear’s Reading Power – The Power to Infer

I’ve recently discovered Gear’s Power books – Reading Power, Nonfiction Reading Power, and Writing Power.  You can learn more about them at her Reading Power website.

In today’s session, I focused on inferring and I taught several of the suggested activities straight from the R.P. book…along with a few of my own twists of course.  Here’s what we did.  In essence, I followed the lesson design model – hook, input, objective, modeling, check for understanding, practice, and closure – in an effort to show how you can develop the inferring skills of your middle school students:

• Inferring with Comics:  You used words or pictures to fill in what you think happened between each frame of select Calvin and Hobbes comic strips
• Rubbing Shoulders at a Medieval Fair: You were given a playing card and, without looking at the card, held it to your forehead.  You then moved about “the fair” and, by virtue of the verbal and nonverbal responses of others, tried to determine your rank in this society.  Aces were low, by the way.
• Emotions Password: An emotion was written on the front board and a chosen student faced the audience without looking at the emotion.  The class gave her clues to help the student determine what emotion it is.  In order to give a clue, the audience had to think of a time when they actually felt that way.  For instance, “I felt that way once when my sister cut the heads off all of my Barbie dolls.”  The student at the front needs to listen to at least three clues before inferring the emotion.
• Pancakes for Breakfast Readaloud and Thinkaloud:  I read this wordless picture book and shared my inferences aloud as a model of inferential thinking.  Then, I passed the book around the class for others to have a go.
• Yo! Yes? Readaloud and Practice

This book – a conversation between two characters in exchanges of only one or two words – demands a lot of inferential thinking from its readers.   The post-reading activity was for you to create your own dialogue based on the model.  Thankfully our dialogue examples presented for the class went much smoother than this one from HBO’s The Sopranos (Thanks to John for sending me this clip – LH):

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxKI4DuZp7c[/youtube]

I wrapped by outlining how you could bring the inferences around more sophisticated texts.  The Observe-Wonder-Infer with an Image activity and the Facts-Questions-Inferences approach with a children’s book, both set the stage for getting students to make inferences with the texts they’re using in their day-to-day classwork – novels, articles, textbook passages, and what not

Unit Planing Time

We ended today’s session with some time to talk unit planning.

See you all next week.

– Lawrence