And it's back

We had inservice today. Not my favorite day of the school year but a necessary one for teachers and other members of the staff. My district only has one day; we get tomorrow and the weekend off and then greet our students on Monday.

The information presented this year was pretty normal, nothing majorly new or different really. What was different was not surprising, the ideas already having been floated earlier.

However, this day reignited my teacher spark. I've spent most of the last six weeks being not-teacher-me which is not how my summers have gone before. I did not do major curriculum work or worksheet revamping or bulletin board designing. Coming into today I felt a bit out of it as a teacher to be honest.

I sat through the meetings and spent my unscheduled time working in my room where I made progress on some tasks. Then driving home I felt it hit me: the teaching spark had come back. I had reconnected with a part of me that had taken a hibernation.

That desire to build understanding is back.

And it feels good.

Quizizz Accountability

I integrate a variety of websites and their activities in my classroom. I think it helps keep students from getting bored (or at least slows the process) of the same online activities. I have been using Quizizz for about two years now.

One part I don't like as much about Quizizz (and many other online activities) is that when students are done, they do not have a copy of their practice questions. They don't have a page of examples in their notes to review like I would have when I was a student in pre-one-on-one-technology days.

So I have found a solution. Sometimes when we do Quizizz, I print out a copy of the activity ahead of time, one for each student. Then when I start the Quizizz, I make sure to set it so that the questions stay in the same order. (I don't worry about the answer options staying in order; I just warn students that those may be different.)

My students are then responsible for marking down the right answer in their printout and making a note of any questions they missed. At the end they can check again with the answers Quizizz provides to make sure they have everything, but also they write down any notes they might want about the questions. They also can ask for me clarification on questions that are still giving them trouble, and I think they are more likely to ask for help with a paper in front of them instead of having to scroll down to see their missed questions.

Partner Racing Adaptations

My students sit in pairs in my classroom. Sometimes we do activities where I have each student try to be faster than their seatbuddy. For example, we will take the whiteboards and I will say a vocabulary word and whoever writes it correctly and holds the board up first is the winner of the round. While I love adding a competitive element at times--and making the students try to respond quickly because in real life conversations you don't have five minutes to come up with a sentence--I know that there are some pairings where one student is significantly stronger than the partner. (I even heard one boy say that he was going to lose a lot when I announced the racing activity this week.)

I don't want students to feel defeated before I even ask the first question, so I have come up with two adaptations to try to keep things competitive.

1. After a few questions I have students switch partners. Sometimes it's very open-ended who goes and finds a new partner; other times I control where the students go so that they end up in more equal-ability pairings.

2. The student who won the last round has a 5-count "handicap." They have to count to five before they can start writing their answer while the partner can start right away. Every round in a row that is won adds 5 more to the count. Once the other student wins, the first winner goes back to 0 for their counting. This technique worked really well for my Spanish III class as they practiced conditional conjugations, and I loved hearing them try to count quickly!

Hermit Crabs and Monkeys

I believe that being able to communicate in Spanish is more important than being able to write 100% grammatically correct sentences. (Now I still want my students to have proper grammar because the more messed up your grammar is, the harder you are to understand). This means that I have slowly been working towards integrating more use of the language in a fuller context than separated sentence translations. For our house unit that meant a day where for half of a period we sat in a huge circle and described the fictional home of one of the students. I stood in the middle and asked question after question, my hands showing where the different rooms appeared. My questions forced the students to pay attention and be ready to correct me along with use their creativity to design this imaginary home. Two days later when they took their quiz, the bonus was based on part of the description. For eighth period, that question was not connected to house vocabulary but instead was to name one of the pets besides the four dogs. Nearly every student remembered that we had given Andrea a monkey and a hermit crab.
It was a random detail but it was one that pulled them into the story that they had created, that they had ownership in.

Additional reflection: next year I think I might have them take five minutes after the class discussion to draw the house with the help of a partner. While I tried my best to ask individual students questions throughout the activity, I know it was possible for a few to zone out at times and this will help hold them accountable.

Geography Success

Still have work to do to get better success on the geography quiz but warning the Spanish I classes that Antarctica is not an answer on the quiz about Spanish-speaking countries worked! No one tried writing that down as an answer this year :)

That Moment

when you take a little step back and realize that every single one of your students is engaged in the activity--and it's one of your tougher classes.

Spanish II has been working on house vocabulary for the past week and change. Tomorrow is their quiz where they will have to write sentences about what each person/family needed based on a given scenario. Today to practice I broke them up into groups of approximately three kids (uneven numbers meant sometimes a group of four or two). Each group got a whiteboard and writing supplies. They then went to a link through a class website that gave a rundown of sentences describing different people's houses in English.

On a set of desks were 27 questions in Spanish based on those English sentences. Each group got one sentence and then worked together to write a Spanish response to that question on their whiteboard. When ready, they held the whiteboard up for me to check. If wrong, I gave them advice on how to fix it for another attempt. Once they got it right, they got a gold coin from me to put in their treasure chest and then they hurried to change their question out for a new one.

To get a question right, they had to utilize both a variety of vocabulary words (including some of the challenge ones I included in the unit) and correct grammar. They also had to work together as a team to try to get questions answered as quickly as possible (plus I required a different student to write each response).

Reflecting, I think I would love to try to get pictures to replace the English sentences or if not all of them, at least some of them. It would take some time to hunt down/make all the needed images, but it would require more attention to detail and deeper thinking to be successful.

The Little Things

This week Spanish II learned about how many Hispanic people count floors differently than we do in the US. I drew a basic building on the board and had the different numbering, US perspective on one side vs the Hispanic one on the other. However, to make the learning a little more interesting I drew a few smiling faces in the windows of the apartment building and picked one of the students to be the pizza delivery guy. I think next time I might have the class decide on how big of a tip the student earned :)