Treading Water

School is fully underway and I feel like I have just barely been keeping my head above water these past few weeks!  Is anyone with me??  (And we are only 7.5 weeks into this school year!)  Thankfully, the classroom is running rather smoothly.  If it wasn't, I don't know what I would do!  It is just all the other responsibilities and never-ending emails that are running me ragged.  Too bad WBT doesn't have a solution to these non-student issues!


Here are some updates:
1) I started the Genius Ladder a couple of weeks ago.  The kids loved it and for the first time I feel like I taught a relevant, engaging grammar lesson.  I've always disliked grammar myself so it was exciting to see everyone having fun.  


I think I made a mistake when I tried to change it up the second week.  We were suppose to be learning synonyms, and it kind of confused the kids since it was different than we did the first week.  If we had better grasp of the Genius Ladder to start with, I'm sure it wouldn't have been so challenging to add in this concept.  Here is the slide I made on PowerPoint.  -->


2) I still love the Super Improvers Wall!  


3) I got a Smart Board this week!  It's amazing but I have a lot to learn to fully be able to utilize its capabilities.  The students who have used them in the past are helping me to learn.  Are there any Wibbeteers out there who use a Smart Board?  I'd love to see any WBT ideas for it.  


Today we played Mind Soccer on the Smart Board!  It was very basic.  I drew a rectangle on each side of the board for the ball and I put in a clipart image of a soccer ball.  The kids thought it was so cool to have an actual picture of a soccer ball after using the white board eraser as the ball for the past few weeks.  


4) Tomorrow I will have 40 second and third graders in my classroom for half of the day.  What is my first item on the agenda?  Class-yes, teach-ok, and classroom rules of course!


Allison
WBT Intern, 2011-12

The Genius Ladder

The lucky Wibbeteers who have been attending Whole Brain Teaching conferences this summer are talking about something called The Sentence Ladder, aka The Genius Ladder.  It is basically a framework to model creating sentences.  It begins with simple sentences, adds adjectives/adverbs, adds conjunctions, etc.  With practice over the course of the year, students will develop the skills to write their own complex, "genius" sentences!


I haven't had any training on this myself, but sought help on the forum and read others' blogs.  I got some good information here.  And I printed out Erica's visual for the ladder here. So I took this to tutoring with me to try it out on my soon-to-be 4th grader.


We had completed some reading, collected a list of vocabulary words, and looked up the definitions in the dictionary.  Then I introduced the Genius Ladder by reading all the sentences on the ladder and noting how they changed.  I then challenged him to use one of his new vocabulary words to make a simple sentence.  He chose scour.  He thought of a sentence and used air punctuation to model it before putting it on paper.  We worked together to move up the ladder and add to the original sentence.  This is what we came up with:

•            I scour the car.              
•          I scour the red car.           
•   I scour and clean the red car.  

That is as far as we got, but I figure it is pretty good for the first try.  For my 2nd graders I know this will be a much longer process with much time spent on modeling.  Andrea Schindler passed on this advice:

We want to expose them to all the sentence types. Since the beginning stages of the sentence ladder are where the teacher is doing all the writing~ and modeling how the sentences become more complex, this is easy to do. Later they will "help me (the teacher)" and share their ideas to help construct the sentences. They will not be creating their own until much later. 

Below you will see three different representations of the Genius Ladder.  Thank you to Erica, Georgia Ramsey, and Ocalacna for sharing!  More info can be found in the WBT Model Classroom ebook.

Allison
WBT Intern, 2011-12