Mass Customized Learnings/ Bold Beginnings

My crazy week has come to an end! Here's a little recap for you!
Monday - Student teachers had a workshop today. There were several interesting topics that we discussed! We had an after school counselor from Lewiston come and teach us how to better relate and interact with our students to make learning more meaningful. The most informational part of the whole day was the presentation on mass customized learning. I've heard of the topic before, but I never had the opportunity to discuss how it worked in a real school system. It was really interesting to hear their daily structure/routine and how they begin their school year. It was something I would like to learn more about, because I can see some real potential in this system. I love how students get to learn at their level, so they aren't feeling left behind when they can't grasp certain concepts. I know that a lot of people aren't switching over because they're afraid that their scores will fall. However, the people who came to talk to us said that once they switched over their scores actually increased. This was due to them being able to go back in and fill all of the holes that some students had, which made it easier for them to deal with higher concepts.
Wednesday through Friday I was back in second grade! So great to see my old class! On Friday, I was able to do a lesson plan on bold beginnings. We started the lesson by reading the first page of Patricia Polacco's story Babushka Baba Yaga and then discussed if the beginning made us want to read more. We all agreed that we did! We shared what about her opening wanted us to keep reading. All the students had different reasons as to why her opening was so interesting, it was fun to hear them all! We then looked at an anchor chart about bold beginnings and different ways you can hook your reader.

 

After we went over the chart we looked a few examples. I read four openings from different books and students had to place them in their the good category or needs more work category. If it needed more work, then we brainstormed ways that students could make the opening more interesting. 

 

Then we learned about the "Try 3" method. We looked at our own writing and tried three bold beginning strategies to make it more interesting. Before we did it independently, we did one as a class- Here is was the students came up with!

We had lots of fun with this lesson! It was divided into three "mini lessons" throughout our daily 5 schedule!

I also wanted to take a second in this post to just post some pictures from our adverb mini unit- it lasted four days.  I wrote about the unit in one of my previous posts, but I didn't have pictures on my laptop to post at that time- SO here they are!

Here is our adverb anchor chart. After watching the Schoolhouse Rock adverb video, we went over this anchor chart and students added their own examples of adverbs to the chart!

The last day of the lesson, we made adverb trees. Students were given four different adverbs and were asked to make them into a sentence. They wrote their sentences on a leaf and we attached the leaves to a tree trunk! Here is one example of a finished product! They were all so cute and so good!