What Comes Next?

“What comes next?” is a deceptively simple question. Identifying a series and predicting what comes next is a critical thinking skill that lets us test comprehension of a wide range of math concepts — and one which we use as adults in reading, planning, and decision making as well.

Use craft sticks and chart stickers to create “What Comes Next?” games or centers customized for your classroom, or have students make “What Comes Next?” puzzles for each other.

It’s very easy. Use stickers on one side of a craft stick to establish a pattern. End with a question mark. Turn the stick over and add the next item in the series so the puzzle will be self-checking.

Here we have groups of pink stickers in simple patterns: one sticker, two stickers, one sticker, two stickers… Other sticks show [one, two, one, one, two] and [one, two, three,one, two, three], and so on.

You can use chart stickers to match your current classroom theme, or put all your leftover chart stickers into a box and pull it out for this project.

Use numbers of items, colors, right and left facing stickers, different items, or any concept or pattern you’re working on in class.

Stickers make this fun for younger students, but you can also create puzzles with numbers or expressions. Have students work out puzzles for one another. The steps are simple:

• Decide on an action that can be taken on any number. This could be “add 3″ or “multiply by 2 and add 1″ or “subtract the preceding number” or “multiply by the final digit of the preceding number” — anything at all.
• Choose a beginning number and write it on the left of the stick.
• Apply the action to that number to create the next number in the sequence. Repeat this step several times.
• End with a question mark.
• Flip the stick and write the next number in the sequence. You could also give the rule, such as “n-3,” and write that on the back (answer side) of the stick.

When students have completed their puzzle sticks, have them trade and work to figure out one another’s puzzles. Add an element of competition by allowing students to keep the puzzle sticks they solve and return those that stump them.

Alternatively, keep the puzzle sticks in a pencil cup, pocket chart, or shoe box for fast finishers to solve — and let them create more, too.

Multimedia for Young Students

One of the realities of the 21st century is that we get information from many different media. Typical scene in an ordinary American home: you get up in the morning to the sound of the news on your clock radio and check Twitter, then turn on the TV to follow the story you got interested in from those two channels, read the paper with your coffee, turn on the radio as you drive to school, discuss the headlines with colleagues at work, catch some international perspectives at Facebook and the BBC news site, read a related article in a magazine at lunch, and finish up in the evening with a YouTube report or response on the subject.

That’s also how we want our older students to approach a subject, using primary sources, interviews, and a range of print and other media to gather, analyze, and synthesize information before they write their papers.

How can we prepare little kids for this relationship with information? Fortunately, there are things for little kids that are available in multiple media channels. One example is a new book/CD from Trout Fishing in America, a family music band .

Their newest recording, Chicken Joe Forgets Something Important, is a CD with a book. It’s not just a recording of the book, but a CD containing songs and the story, plus a home movie of the band in Ezra’s treehouse and a printable PDF file with lyrics and the illustrated story. (Get full details about Trout Fishing’s latest release.) A product like this offers a variety of different kinds and sources of information, which kids can put together to gain a fuller understanding of the story,  just as we do when we get information from multiple channels.

Here’s a video of one of the songs, “16 or 17 Hours of Sleep,” to enjoy in your classroom.

Chicken Joe Forgets Something Important is the story of Chicken Joe, a cat who sleeps in a hen house, and how he forgot a very important day: his own birthday!

Think of all the teaching points here:

• animal homes
• birthdays
• remembering and forgetting
• animals
• farm
• sleep and health
• friendship
• rock and roll
• music
• secrets
• rhyming

How can you bring lots of different media into the classroom without bringing in chaos as well?

Start with the book. Read aloud to the students and use your favorite techniques to ensure and assess understanding — we like Feelings Puppets and sentence strip sequencing, acting out the story, and using story maps and graphic organizers to retell the story or follow along.

Move on to a video or listening selection, whether it’s a recording of a story, music, or another related multimedia element. With this example, there are lots of choices, so you can experience different  aspects of the story each day as you work with it. Giving kids a focus for listening, such as finding the answer to a particular question or drawing an illustration for the story or song, can help keep the classroom calm even when the video or recording is exciting.

The illustrations by Stephane Jorisch are charming, and lend themselves to “read the picture” activities as well. Following up with a quieter, more focused activity of this kind can help students settle down while bringing in new information. We also like to move kids away from the screen for a while and give them opportunities to interact with physical objects like books and art supplies.

Finally, give the kids a chance to produce something of their own in response. For young children, drawing a picture or creating a dance that expresses what they understand of the story is perfect. Slightly older students can write a letter to the artists (contact info at the links above) or write their own song or story.

We hear a lot about “information overload.” It isn’t practical to reduce the amount of information children receive or to limit the number of channels, but by helping them to learn how to process it, we can reduce overstimulation and help them make good use of varied media.

Blogging for the Classroom

A classroom blog gives you a place to report daily on what happens at school, to have conversations with students without time pressure, to share resources and information.

So how can you get started with one?

Free blogging platforms

There are lots of places online where you can set up a free blog. Here are some favorites:

• WordPress is the platform we use for FreshPlans. This isn’t a free WordPress blog, so we have some options you won’t at WordPress.com, but either way WordPress is a good combination of easy and powerful. We’ve got a series on Your New WordPress Site that walks you through the basics of setting up your WordPress blog. There are six parts, with videos and screenshots.
• Blogger is #2 among free blog sites. We’ve got an introduction to Blogger, too.
• Weebly is less well known, but a favorite of mine. They have lots of fun themes, and their instructions are simple and easy to follow.
• If you a prefer an education-specific blogging platform, try Edublogs.
• If your school doesn’t allow any of these, or — like mine — prefers the use of the internal system, you can adapt a discussion room feature to act like a blog. It’s not the best option, but it can be done.

Now what?

You can write a little bit every day about what’s going on in the classroom. We set up a blog for a preschool that was mostly for the parents (we made it private) and the teachers take pictures and upload videos as well as writing about their classroom adventures. Kids enjoy seeing what they’ve been doing, and watching or reading together with parents is a great way to encourage family conversations about the subjects covered at school.

If you have older students, as I do, ask them questions. I give points for participation, and I like to see thoughtful answers to the questions I pose — but I also enjoy seeing new students saying, “omg I can tell we’re going to be besties!” to each other. Decide how casual you want to allow students to be and post some rules to keep things in line.

Blogs have the advantage of flexibility. Try it out and see what evolves!

Small Group Work: Getting Started

My first class of the year went well. I have lots of interesting students in the class, people spoke up, no one fell asleep, the level of engagement was high and the amount of obvious texting was low. The time came to get people into groups for the first time.

Group work now is a far cry from group work when I was a kid, when we had the Astronauts, the Race Car Drivers, and the Cowboys. We were sorted into these ability based groups at the beginning of the year, and it was once an astronaut, always an astronaut.

My students are mostly in their late teens; I figure it’s time they learn how to form groups without direction, so I just shared the desired outcome and encouraged them while they figured it out. But sometimes I like to be more directive, and with younger students you have to be. Once the class dynamic settles in, you may have groupings you want to avoid, or students who get left out, or other issues that make natural group development less desirable.

Here are some ways to get students into groups:

• Psychogeometrics is one of many ways of testing people’s learning or work style. I like this one because it’s fast, and statistically speaking, it works just as well as the more complicated approaches. Follow the link to read more about it, or use your favorite method of sorting — What Character Would You be in Winnie the Pooh, the Myers-Briggs inventory, whatever — and group students so that each table has the greatest possible variety of approaches.
• Divide people by some random characteristic like first letter of last name. Changing characteristics like having buttons on your shirt or shoe color work well if you like to mix up the group.
• Create a glyph exercise with any data you like and have students look around till they find students whose glyphs match their own.
• Number off and have students with the number 1 sit together, students with the number 2, etc. Or add some fancier math and have all prime numbers sit together or have each group’s numbers total ten.
• Cut slips of paper from different colors and patterns of paper and put them in a hat. Have students pull out a slip and find the others with the same paper.
• Use the online Hogwarts Sorting Hat.

Clearly, some systems work better when you want a smaller group and some when you want a larger group, some will give you even numbered groups and some won’t, and some are more random than others. Consider the desired outcome in terms of these factors before choosing a particular method.

The Multiplayer Classroom

I’ve just read The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game by Lee Sheldon. Sheldon, who teaches video game design, set up his whole classroom as a multiplayer game in which students went on quests and leveled to the next highest grade. He has written a book about it which includes not only the story of his experience but also a few stories from teachers who’ve used this approach for classes from 7th grade math to high school biology and college education classes.

Teachers who’ve tried making their class into a game find in some cases that retention, motivation, and attendance improve. It also sounds like fun, and student comments suggest that they find it fun.

It’s an exciting book to read, because it opens up intriguing new possibilities. At no point, however, does Sheldon provide a step by step plan for transforming your class in this way. So I tried to think about how it could work for my writing classes. ‘

Here are the characteristics that seem to make a classroom into a game, and how it might work in a writing class:

• Avatars and Guilds In Sheldon’s classes, students use “avatars,” or character names and identities, and are placed into “guilds,” or groups working together. My classes work in groups a lot, but I encourage them to mix it up and work with different people. If one group prefers to stick together, I allow it, but I also make an effort to create random teams and pairs. Guild thinking could provide some good opportunities for peer pressure to follow rules, though: some of the teachers in the book gave everyone in a guild extra points if all  guild members did their homework, for example.
• Leveling Instead of or in addition to grades, students in game classrooms get to “level,” or rise to a higher status in the game, by getting points. I already give points, though some teachers have everyone start with an A and then take away points. Some don’t use a point system at all. Leveling is more public than grading, but it may also come with less emotional baggage. Many of the teachers who wrote about this — including those who separated leveling from grades entirely — found that students were very positive about leveling. I’m not a gamer, but I think I get that. If you look at our About Us page, you’ll see that I’m displaying my 99 points badge from Website Grader, even though I’m quite sure that nobody cares, and I certainly don’t get anything from it. Sometimes those points give you, as Sheldon puts it, fiero. XEODesigns defines “fiero” as “hard fun,” which is exactly how I like my classes to be. XEODesigns has a game plan framework which I think will make an excellent planning tool for my writing class — and maybe for yours, too.
• Quests Instead of assignments, a game classroom has quests. While many of the teachers in the book used ordinary assignments as their quests, they had options (what we might usually call extra credit, or alternative assignments) and they gave the assignments cooler names. I have students write five papers individually, all of which have rewrites or extra assignments such as turning in an outline first. They do one or two collaborative papers as well, and there are in-class practices on all kinds of topics.  I also have readings and extra credit grammar games. I think the assignments could be turned into quests
• Chance Sheldon gave reading assignments, and then rolled dice to determine whether or not there would be a quiz on a given day. He also had his students prepare class presentations, and rolled dice to determine who gave the presentation each day. I can imagine this being irritating to some students, frankly. However, I think I’ll reproduce this method for the week or two I spend on punctuation and grammar, since no one but me really enjoys that anyway.
• Rewards While Sheldon discusses the concerns about extrinsic rewards in education, all the examples included rewards of various kinds, both virtual and physical world. Most teachers give rewards, whether it be stickers or pizza parties or praise, so gamification just makes the rewards more transparent and builds them into the system.

I’m going to try it, at least in a limited way. I have online and face to face classes which use online tools to varying degrees (one of my classes has a requirement that students be able to participate fully without internet access at home, one is online only, and one is officially called a hybrid), so I can explore different approaches.

What do you think?

File Folder Centers

File folder centers can really help you differentiate instruction, allowing extra practice for those who need it and also allowing fast finishers to move on to additional activities that will challenge them.

You can use books like those from Scholastic’s  Mini File-Folder Centers in Color series to create centers. Just cut and paste — no copying or coloring needed. Carson-Dellosa, whose copy and color center games books provided hours of occupation for so many of us back in the day, even has ready made centers in a box, such as Science File Folder Games: Skill-Building Center Activities for Science.  They also have new cut and paste books like Colorful File Folder Games. These centers are available for PK through elementary in practically every subject. Our Princess and the Pea unit works well for centers, too.

You can also make your own, though. Here are some basic recipes for creating file folder centers from leftover classroom decoratives.

Worksheet style centers

Janie Blagg made this one, decorating it with bits cut from the header of her bulletin board (we never throw away those headers!) and then she laminated it. As long as kids use erasable markers, they can erase the answers and you can reuse the same sheets for years.

Pick and Put centers

Myra Grayson showed us how to make these, and I can’t count how many we’ve made since then! The central idea is to put pockets with items to be sorted, plus pockets to sort the things into. In this example, little ones sort clock faces saying 12:00 from those with other times, as a first step toward time telling (it fits with a Cinderella theme).

We like it for any kind of true/false question, sorting into groups like living/nonliving or plant/animal/mineral. We’ve used it to sort things true about Native Americans, European American settlers, and both.

As you can see in the example below, you don’t have to use pockets (though we love Peel and Stick Book Pockets  for the convenience).  The center below hasn’t yet been glued into its file folder, but we’ve used die cut frog cutouts for Fact and Opinion and then written facts and opinions on the backs of little frog mini accents.  We adhered the paper to the folder and added the clear pocket full of statements.

For the example below, we used cutouts for the sorting files, leaving the edges unglued so kids can tuck the slips into place. This center compares words like “mandible” with words like “animal” and “beetle,” focusing on the different spelling patterns for the same English sound. We wrote words on paper slips, leaving off the endings so kids can sort them according to the spellings. We were working with an insect theme here, so we’ve got D.J.Inkers’ Ladybugs Cut-Outs, but  anything will work. We actually cut the storage pocket (the red pocket where the word slips are stored when the center is not in use) from paper, since we didn’t have a library pocket on hand.

 

Mini timelines

Mini timeline centers are versatile, and they make make great use of those leftover border strips. For this one, we used a fiesta themed border and wrote events from Mexican history on craft sticks. We taped the border down with double-sided tape just along the bottom and laminated the folder. Then we used a craft knife to slice open the top only of the border, creating a long pocket. One strip of an ordinary bulletin board border will make a two-pocket file folder center like this one.

Students arrange the sticks in the pockets created by the border. We put the dates on the back of the sticks to make it self-checking.

We’ve used this for history stuff involving dates, of course, but also for steps in a process, events in a book, the alphabet — anything that needs to be put in order.

Okay, now invite your friends over for an evening of file folder center creation. Have them bring all the leftover decoratives from their classroom closets so you can swap and get a good assortment of goodies, put on a fun movie, and make a party of it!

 

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