During my first year, I always had an agenda up for the class to see. It was mostly for myself because I wanted to have access to a visible list during my lesson to remind me of the key areas I'd need to remember to hit that day. But during our summer school PDs, one of my colleagues shared her variation of daily agendas. You'll see that they look like your typical web or concept map. It's a perfect visual tool for the kids and the teacher. This allows you to see how many main "chunks" there are in your lesson(s) that day and what tasks or ideas branch from them. I've created these agenda maps on the smart board, but more importantly on chart paper, so that students who are absent have easy access to finding out what they missed in previous days. |
29 Comments
*UPDATE: I want to add that at the end of each school day for the first 3 days, I changed student's seats around completely. This helped me to get to know them and observe where and with whom they work best. After 3 days, I put together a more permanent seating arrangement. Every now and then I still switch around students based on behavior, level of cooperation with surrounding peers, and ability (based on informal assessments). In a table of 4, I prefer to have two "low-medium" students sitting in front of each other, with a "medium-high" student next to each of them. This way, student A who might be low/medium will have a companion who is medium/high as their shoulder partner, and a companion who is closer to their ability level as their face partner. Having these seats pre-arranged makes it VERY easy to do activities such as jigsaws when I want to have homogenous groups and heterogenous groups. If all of my low/medium students are already sitting at all of the desks labeled as "2's" and "4's" then it's easy to identify them and put them in the same expert groups for a jigsaw. Likewise for my medium/high students.
|