Creating a Choice Board

You want your students to demonstrate mastery of a concept of skill. However, it’s not so important how they demonstrate it. That’s a perfect opportunity to differentiate and give students some choice.

One opportunity for student choice is a choice board. In a choice board, students are given a range of options to demonstrate their mastery. The best choice boards have options for all learning styles. Here’s a template I like to use (Click Choice Board Template to download):

choice board template

A few things to note:

  • The choices vary in amount and type of creativity required, but choice D is the basic regurgitate something you learned in a poster option. Perhaps a student will draw the nitrogen cycle after learning about the nitrogen cycle, or s/he will draw a cell after learning about the cell. No creativity required and no research required.
  • Choices A and H require writing. A is a creative writing piece and H is an expository writing piece – requiring different skills and addressing different types of students.
  • Choices B, C, E, F and H all require research into some aspect of the topic. After completing a unit on the nitrogen cycle, for example, students choose one aspect of the cycle to independently research. Then, they can share their research as: B. a slide show; C. a graph, perhaps comparing the percentages of gases in the atmosphere over time; E. a poster of molecular structures of nitrates and nitrogen; F. a flowchart on the production of urea in mammals; H. an essay on the evolution of nitrogen fixing bacteria.
  • Choices A, G, and I require creativity not normally demonstrated in science class and fulfiling them is not always going to be apparent to students. For choice A, a student might write a fictional story about a planet where decomposition doesn’t take place or a “day in the life” of a nitrogen atom. For choice G, a student might prepare a menu including foods from one specific food chain only. For choice I, students would need to find, or write their own, songs about the atmosphere (Breathe by Faith Hill? Walking on Air by Katy Pery?)

When I create a choice board, I use this basic format but then preselect which research ideas I’m going to suggest be presented as slideshows, essays, posters, or flowcharts.

In middle school, many students need gentle guidance rather than a direction to “Go research something!” However, as your students mature and your relationship with them grows, you might consider replacing one of the choices with a “Student’s Choice” option, allowing students to come up with their own option. Very often, students who choose this option will hold themselves to a much higher standard than you would have predicted.

Try it. Let me know what happens!

Desert Choice Board

Back To School Activities

The first few days of school are special. You’re meeting strangers who are going to quickly become some of the most important people in your life. Students from many years ago still tell me that they remember what I was wearing or what joke I told on the first day of school. Make your first impression a good one.

One activity that I enjoy doing is the “What Matters To Me?” activity. It ties science nicely into to getting to know the students. I give each student a clip art picture of a flask and ask them to fill it in with what matters to them. Sometimes I ask them leading questions – what are your favorite things about school, what do you hope this school year is like – and other times I just leave it blank and have students decide for themselves what it should be about.

Since it’s the first assignment of the year, students often go all out – they cut pictures out of magazines and decorate their flasks with their favorite football team colors. We hang them around the room and leave them up for most of the year to admire. You can download your own copy of “What Matters to Me” on my TpT store.

Every year, I try to do at least a few of these Getting to Know you activities. Kids love “minute to win it” activities and I mix it up – some whole class activities and some team activities. At the end of the year, my students always comment on how much fun their first days of school were because of these minute to win it games. 

Another activity I enjoy is the #20YearsFromNow. In this activity, I give students two frames to draw pictures of themselves in. One picture is themselves today, and they label the picture with hashtags that describe themselves. The second picture is 20 years in the future and they label that picture with hashtags to describe what they hope/want their futures to be like.

This is a fun way to get to know who they are and who they want to be. You can download your own copy of #20YearsFromNow at my TpT store.

 

What are your Back-To-School activities?

Time Out for Neowise

Have you seen Comet Neowise yet?

We weren’t motivated enough to see it during its morning apparitions, but the evening ones gave us hope. We have a good western horizon near us so we ventured out a few night ago.

There were maybe a dozen or so people sharing the view with us on Monday night, and about 30 on Tuesday. We used binoculars and were able to see it once the sky got pretty dark, around 9:15. On Tuesday, the comet had set behind the horizon around 9:40, but that is going to keep getting later for the next few days. It’s quite lovely – nice long tail, slight hint of a split, large coma. Naked eye, it’s a fuzzy star with an obvious tail when the sky is dark enough.

Where to look? Find the Big Dipper, which is pretty high, around sunset. Comet Neowise is LOW LOW LOW below the Big Dipper. Unless you’ve got fantastic dark skies, you won’t be able to see it without binoculars or a telescope until sky is very dark – any hint of dusk will wash it out.

Here’s one of my husband’s photos of Comet Neowise, taken without magnification.

Have you seen it yet?

10 Ideas to Increase Distance Learning Engagement

Whether we’re back in school full time in September or in some sort of hybrid model, we’re going to need to address the elephant in the room – engagement. Students will have a difficult time adjusting to either model after 3 months of remote instruction in the spring. There will be plenty of challenges but the only pieces I can control are my curriculum and my instruction. Both can go a long way to improving engagement, so here is my top 10 list for building engagement in the “new normal.”

  1. Build relationships with students. Students are more engaged and work harder for teachers they like and for teachers they think like them. Get to know them informally. Chat. Get to know them formally with guided bellringers and focused conversations.
  2. Maintaining a regular routine will make the transition back to school easier for students which will make it easier for them to engage. Begin every class period with a bellringer. Have a few minutes of direct instruction, then a few minutes of independent or group investigation or experimentation and end with a closure that brings it all back home. Surprises are fun, but routine is more accessible for students.
  3. Provide choice. Students perform better when they have some control over what they do. When my daughter first started having an opinion about the clothes she wore, maybe age 2, it would take hours of debate and struggle for her to choose an outfit from her closet, and often it was not an appropriate outfit for the occassion or weather. Instead of giving her the entire closet to choose from, I gave her the choice of 2 or 3 outfits that were equally appropriate. Use this in your classroom. Provide choice, but not unlimited choices. Give students control and they will perform better.
  4. Digitize as much as possible. Obviously, that addresses the need for flexibility since we seem rudderless for September. Expect the best but prepare for the worst. But digital resources are more engaging for students, especially since shared hands on resources will likely be banned. Digital resources are also flexible for hybrid situations. Hyperdocs and digital labs also save paper, so win-win 🙂
  5. Allow your students to work in groups. We’re receiving direction that there is to be no sharing of materials and that students must remain socially distant. But that doesn’t mean they can’t cooperate on a shared Google doc to create a product. They can share data and observations during labs digitally. They can partner together in Zoom breakout rooms.
  6. Gamify your classroom. I’ve always used games in my classroom – they are naturally engaging and motivating for students – but we’re going to need to arrange for games that don’t use shared resources. Kahoot, here we come! I’ve always been a big fan of escape rooms – I love the Breakout.edu resources and have a ton of locks and boxes that make the kids’s eyes light up – but I’m moving toward digital escape rooms this year.
  7. Provide brain breaks. The age and temperament of your students will determine how often and what type of brain break you should use, but I think it’s going to be more important now than ever.
  8. Engage with phenomena. The NGSS have long proposed that phenomenon based instruction boosts engagement. Present students with a photo or a demo of something to pique their curiosity.
  9. Be present. If we’re remote, live lessons are more engaging than video lessons but video lessons are more engaging than worksheets.
  10. Provide meaningful feedback quickly. When a student submits work, they should obviously receive a grade, but, more importantly, they should receive guidance on how to improve next time. Imagine receiving a mediocre report on your observation. “Fine,” you think and forget it. But if it included specific strategies to improve next time, you’d be more inclined to include those strategies in your lessons to improve your score.

 

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Energy Sources PBL

Students are more engaged and learn more when they participate in a problem based activity compared to a more traditional classroom activity. To teach energy sources, I use a PBL that is adaptable for independent or group work and is adaptable for in school instruction and for remote learning.

To begin this PBL, students learn that they have inherited an island. It is huge – large enough for literally anything they can imagine.

Here’s where you hook them. Let them dream big – water parks, luxurious spas, golf courses, amusement parks, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters.

Then, students have to figure out how to provide energy to support all of the activities they want to include.

This will work as a summative assessment after teaching energy sources, but it can also be a springboard to engage students into learning about the different energy sources so they can make an informed decision.

Provide research materials about the energy sources you want your students to learn about. I opted to allow them to choose from petroleum, hydroelectric power, solar power, and wind power, so I provided them with hyperdoc research documents. For some students, Google is a great resource. For middle school students, I find that guided research is more productive.

After learning about the different types of energy, students outline the pros and cons of using each type on their island. What’s the best economically? Which is most readily available? Which is going to produce the least pollution? Which will be the least unattractive for guests?

Finally students create a SlideShow with a drawing of their island and a persuasive paragraph explaining why they chose the energy source they chose.

To modify this, you could increase the requirement to a 5 paragraph essay for students who need more of a challenge, or provide a template for students who need more support.

While you’re teaching energy sources, try a free renewable and non-renewable energy scavenger hunt! It’s a great way to get kids up and moving and learning the vocabulary of alternative energy. Read more here.

Designing a Hybrid Unit

Last week I hypothesized that schools would be moving toward hybrid schedules – in person instruction some days and remote or distance learning other days. The challenge is to cover the same content in less contact time. This is a unit I designed on atomic structure.

What do I want to accomplish? On paper, I’m addressing NGSS  MS-PS1-1 – Develop models to describe the atomic composition of simple molecules and extended structures. In reality, I’m teaching students how to determine how many protons, neutrons, and electrons an atom has and how to represent that atom as a Bohr model and as a Lewis dot structure.

Day 1: In person instruction. What is an atom? What do they look like? What are the subatomic particles? How many subatomic particles are in an atom? As usual, I teach this using a Google SlideShow as my anchor with cloze notes for students. I prepared the cloze notes as a hyperdoc that students can complete on their Chromebooks during class or at home if we change to fully remote instruction.

Day 2: Remote or distance learning. Students will accomplish two things on this day. First, they will practice calculating protons, neutrons, and electrons so that we can move on to drawing atoms tomorrow. Secondly, they will do some research into the development of the atomic theory in a choice board.

Day 3: In school instruction. Continuing with my SlideShow and cloze notes, I’ll teach how to draw a Bohr model of the atom. Because it’s possible (probable?) that some students (if not all) will be doing this remotely, I made the cloze notes completely digital so I included instructions on how to use Google Drawings and add it to the notes.

Day 4: At home remote/distance learning. Practice drawing Bohr models of atoms using hyperdocs.

Day 5: In school instruction on valence electrons and Lewis dot structures of atoms using a Slideshow and hyperdoc cloze notes. Finish the lesson by drawing Lewis dot structures of the first 18 atoms and hopefully identifying the pattern of valence electrons in the periodic table.

Day 6: At home review of all concepts in an escape room type of activity.

On Day 7, students would be assessed on what they’ve learned.

If schools adopt this one day in, one day out strategy, curricular materials can be assigned either in class if teacher assistance is required or for remote learning if students can manage on their own.

What unit have you started modifying?

Moving to Hybrid Learning

No matter how you slice it, my classroom in September will not look like any previous Septembers. I don’t know if we’re going to be completely digital, completely in person with 6 foot distances and masks, or some kind of weird hybrid/chimera situation.

The two hybrids I saw floating around are daily hybrids – half of the kids in school on odd days, the rest in on even days – and weekly hybrids – half of the kids in one week and the other half the week later. I’m not going to belabor the pros and cons of each of these models – I’ll leave that to the muckety mucks – but I have to get my groove on and start planning.

Let’s assume there’s going to be a hybrid situation. That means that I’m covering the curriculum in person twice – once with each half of my students. While they’re not with me, they need to have standards based curricular content that they can work with. The home time has to continue to move the curriculum forward, or else I only cover half of the curriculum all year.

Sounds alien? No. We’ve been doing it all along. We used to call it “Flipped Learning” and “Station Model.” Now we’re calling it “Hybrid.” Same stuff, different day.

Let’s imagine we’re on a daily hybrid situation. Day 1 – students in class. Day 2- students working on materials at home (while I’m doing Day 1 with the other half of the kids). Day 3- back in school. Day 4 – back at home.

A good general format might be:

  • Day 1 – in school – introduce concepts, do an introductory lab, teach new skill.
  • Day 2 – at home – learn and practice vocab, write lab analysis, practice skill.
  • Day 3 – in school – group activities or discussions, whole class review, another lab.
  • Day 4 – at home – assessment.

The trick to planning, I think, is separating which activities must be done in school from the activities that can be done at home and then sequencing them so that students will have learned the requisite skills and concepts before they have to practice them at home.

If we move to a week by week hybrid, perhaps the plan is:

  • Week 1 – in school – introduce concepts, do labs, teach skills, review.
  • Week 2 – at home – practice vocab and skills, write lab analysis, take assessment.

Again, the most challenging piece to teachers is going to be ensuring that students have learned the skills and concepts before they go home. Another challenge with the weekly hybrid is that teachers will be working double duty – monitoring home students and assisting as needed more frequently than if the rotation was daily. Imagine the student who practiced a skill wrong for an entire week – you’ve got to catch the mistakes early before they become irreversible.

Here’s a first draft of hybrid lessons I designed for my atomic structure unit. I’d love your feedback. In the mean time, let me know what your school is thinking.

Building relationships

The name of the game in middle school is building relationships. Students learn more from teachers that they feel a connection with.

It’s important to teach standards based content. But it’s more important to teach students. Which is why I include relationship building into my lesson plans.

Every Friday, the normal Bellringer for my middle schoolers is a Group Chat. I call it Face to Face Friday. As each student walks in, I hand them a card with a question on it. Depending on the class size, there might be 4 or 5 different questions – enough for a group of 5-6 students to all get the same question. Questions include “Would you rather…” kinds of questions as well as more open ended questions. I might purposefully put 2 students together, or purposefully separate 2 students, if my antennae are picking up anything that needs adjusting.

The first thing students must do is find the other people with the same question. If you color coordinate the cards, it’s easier. Then, I set the timer for 3 minutes while they discuss their answers. Finally, each group chooses a reporter to share their answer with the class. One rule I’ve implemented is that no one can be a reporter two weeks in a row. I don’t bother policing that – students do it for me.

As students discuss their questions, we learn a little bit about them. Sure, we learn thing like “Would you rather eat ice cream for every meal or not at all?” but we also learn how they communicate, how they express agreement and disagreement, and how they take turns. We help them navigate working with different students every week. We help them manage developing interpersonal relationships within the confines of a structured activity.

How do you encourage students to build relationships?

Skills you should have by now

It’s the end of June. We’ve been in a worldwide pandemic for more than 3 months. You should have mastered these skills by now:

  1. Wearing a mask. It helps protect you and it helps protect others. It’s not rocket science, but the sooner we all stop passing the virus around, the sooner we can return to life as we knew it. Cover your nose and mouth.
This is how you do it. Key points to notice: nose and mouth are covered. Eyes are not.

2. Mute yourself when you’re not talking on Zoom and unmute yourself when you are talking. Come on, folks. This is now a basic life skill. Figure it out.

What’s making you crazy this month?

Photo cred: original photo and license