Pace Yourself | Wednesday, September 8th 2021

[Music] all right it's 402 and i'm actually going to be leaving here soon but i'm not going home just yet i am going to go to an elementary school in my district where i know the principal pretty well because she was the assistant principal here last year and i'm going to take a look at that school's guided reading room where they have all these level books because i would like to try and do a scaled down version of guided reading at the middle school level during my universal access time which is basically my small group time with my students because it's an easier way for me to address some of the comprehension needs in a short spurt of time as opposed to doing whole novel studies i honestly don't have time to do that so she has been kind enough to let me come take a look and see if there's a couple of sets that i can borrow and for a few days and then drop them off so i'm going to leave and do that um and then i'm going to go home and potentially cook because i have a meeting tomorrow and i'm supposed to go to orange theory tomorrow and i'm not going to want to cook after that but we shall see how i feel today i i made a very concerted effort to get some footage of me teaching and i think i got some the part of me teaching language arts i at this point i don't know how much of it i got because i know at some point the camera died but um i know i got some footage for history so what we've been looking at for the past two days is the boston massacre and i am using this near pod lesson i went ahead last year we had near pod like the basic version of near pod for free because of covet i think the district bought it or i can't remember if near pop was just providing it uh but that term ran out and so i was not going to renew it at first because like these platforms they cost money and i want to say it was like a hundred and something dollars to increase the space which i needed to do to actually be able to use more lessons than just a handful so i decided to purchase it last week and i'm gonna use it this year and see if it's something that i think is worth purchasing enough so like we get reimbursed a very small amount of money like 100 a year maybe that's something i'll use my money on in the future since the school is now paying for vocabulary so i found this lesson on the boston massacre that i really like because it's talking about the boston massacre but it also incorporates a um stanford education history group lesson that i did last year on you know witnesses witness accounts of the boston massacre and sourcing documents and the reliability of documents and what makes some documents more reliable than others that lesson is integrated into this near pot lesson as well as like two separate video clips that depict what the boston massacre was all about and then touches on the boston tea party and then of course nearpod just has interactive slides in between so that the kids are responding as you go and so i knew that the lesson itself would take a couple of days um but it's taking a little bit more which is fine because we're having good discussions because there's a lot of discussion questions that pop up that you can relate to things that we've seen like in modern times like one of the questions was asking them do you think because it showed a um a memorial or like yeah i think you would call it a memorial or a monument that's devoted to the boston massacre that's located in boston so one of the questions was asking them do you think the government should spend funds resources etc in creating monuments to historical events so we talked about that and then we talked about that in current times and what we've seen in the news in the past year or so where people are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to historical monuments statues and whether or not they're appropriate should they be there or not so in both classes we have pretty good discussion i feel like it's completely fair because without them we would have lost the war and we would have to leave and america wouldn't be here well that's not the only thing it doesn't matter so we completely owed them the money that they gave us they weren't being kind they were saving our lives someone might say and i want you to think about this like if it was truly just a giving altruistic thing um are there any actions post the win of the french indian war that insinuate or that implied that britain really is somehow some way trying to make money off of this yes they got the colonists to win the war and yes they protected the land but is there anything that they've done in the course of the taxing and then taking the taxes back and then creating a new tax that makes you feel like at the end of the day they're trying to get their debts repaid but they're also trying to exploit the colonists and saying we need money from you um and again i told them there is no right or wrong answer like whatever you think is fine just you know let us know what the rationale is behind that so we have some good discussions there so it's taking a little bit longer so that's what we've been doing in history after that we're going to go into the revolutionary war i always just show them this 10-minute video that is called the revolutionary war oversimplified i basically just want them to know this all leads to war there's a war america gains its independence and then we need to get into like the meat of it language arts i am starting like the part of it that the kids are like oh because most kids don't want to write so i am walking them through responding to a first read question on study sync and letting them know that for me these first read questions are significant assignments these aren't just questions you can just throw an answer at and be like i finished i'm done it doesn't matter like they pretty much are the equivalent of a quiz for me in language arts because they're they require a lot of thinking and thoughts so i told them i'm going to walk you through the steps you should be taking and that these steps have been tried and trued uh because i did this with third graders and by the end of the school year when i taught third i myself was impressed with some of the paragraphs third graders were writing just by being disciplined and following these steps so all we've done in the past two days is we've tapped the prompt so i showed them a prompt and if you've been following me for years this is the same thing i've done or that i did in third grade where they look at the prompt let me move this screen it's movable you know that's what's nice about this and um this is what i took footage of me writing yesterday i wrote the prompt down this is the first question from the first read what is the monkey's paw what is herbert white's attitude towards the monkey's paw textual evidence from the selection to support your answer so it's on the first thing that we do is tap the prompt t stands for topic what is the topic and really taking time to pause here to say be careful because the topic is not the monkey's paw that's what a lot of them would want to say oh it's the monkey's paw and then we discuss why that's super vague that could lead you down the wrong path because if you think the topic is just the monkey's paw then you're going to spend all this time talking about the monkey's paw so we finally got to the point where we realized the topic is really herbert white's attitude towards the monkey's paw yes for a brief second you might define what the monkey's paw is and tell what it does very briefly but your focus is that audience is who are you writing this for it's always going to be me so they know that the language should be academic and then we talk about the three purposes of writing which is either to persuade inform or entertain and letting them know for the most part if the prompt really wants you to write a persuasive response it's going to say something that's going to tell you that like write a persuasive response to or give your opinion on or persuade someone to and if they want you to entertain aka write a story they're going to also tell you that in most cases by saying write a narrative create an original story and so i said if you don't hear those phrases in the prompt you know you're not persuading you know you're not entertaining so you're informing slash explaining um so we went over that and then just being very explicit and letting them know that you know i read the story i know i read the story but your response needs to be written as if i've never read the story or as if you would be giving this to someone who is unfamiliar with the story so uh homeroom we're a little bit further along like we're ready to start writing our topic sentence and closing sentence because that would be the next step in the process and in my switch class we just tap the prompt and we haven't listened to the section of the story that we need to listen to and annotate in order to answer that particular question so we'll do that tomorrow um but all in all i'm feeling much better about the teaching today i've been kind of down on myself because like my pacing like things are just taking longer than what i want them to and so um us getting to read this book as frequently as i would like hasn't happened like in a perfect world we'll get into this book at least a little bit every day but several days had gone by since we had been able to read this and i don't want it to go so far that we don't remember what we've read so i conscientiously had to tell myself did i say that right i made a conscious choice to tell myself that you're gonna stop at a certain point to make sure that there is time for this and it's okay if you didn't stop at the section of the lesson that you intended to because there's always tomorrow and that that is just teaching i don't know i mean your pacing's always slower at least for me or you aren't always going to have this nice clean moment where you can say okay let's break here but that's fine as long as you know where you left off so you know where to pick up tomorrow so i feel better about that because i just stopped and in both classes we got to hear a little bit um and they really enjoy the book so i wanted to do that but yeah so um all in all a good day i feel like there's something else i wanted to tell you and i'm just not remembering um mood wise i'm better um so that's always good but i guess i'm gonna head out now because i don't remember what else i was gonna say uh as far as like covet updates and what that's like it's like a rotating door kids are coming and going they'll be here sometimes they go out sometimes they're in quarantine sometimes they're being cautious and as far as managing the work they miss i am just keeping my sanity and really being uh very selective about the work that they absolutely positively have to make up because if you try and have kids make up every single thing that they miss in this particular environment where at any given moment or on any given day you have a couple kids out and could be out for several days you will literally drive yourself crazy because it's like you teaching two classes like you're in person class and then like you're a distance learning class and i just can't do that so i make sure that they know the stuff that absolutely positively needs to be made up but if it's like practice stuff or things we did together in class i generally am just excusing them from from that and just moving on with um our lives so that's pretty much how the day went i'm gonna go ahead and end the vlog here and head out to this elementary school um if you enjoyed today's vlog give it a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed make sure you subscribe and if you're not following me on instagram you know what i'm gonna say head over there follow me on instagram and as always i hope that you guys are well well and if you're not well please be well and i will see you guys tomorrow [Music] you

Channel: SmartieStyle

Views: 2,261

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Id: ooF3iWndOy0

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021