Saturday, February 4, 2012

@Pinterest Revisited

I posted about how I use Pinterest back in July.  I thought that since this is the half way mark in my school year, it would be a great time to share some ideas I've gotten. I love Pinterest more than ever, but I have to be very careful when I go looking - it can be a huge time suck. :) So many lovely ideas, so little time!

I loved this idea - I am always looking for questions to ask in reading groups that relate to Bloom's Taxonomy. I used these in a slightly different fashion though. I have my lovely Bloom's Flag - so I chose 2 or 3 questions and added them to the flag for each level of questioning. It isn't perfect - the question cards are keyed to the "old" Bloom's Taxonomy and my school uses the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy. But now the kids have a very good idea where certain types of questions fall - and I have another good visual reminder to be asking those higher order questions!

We do not require all our students to complete reading logs. Our main purpose this year is to get our kids hooked on reading. And for the most part, most reading logs do not encourage that. We do have a few hard-core kids (perhaps 20 out of 75) who do not meet their goals in AR and who are falling behind academically. We originally had them doing a simple summary reading log. Now we've moved them to this version - and we are all SO MUCH HAPPIER! The kids like the variety and my teaching partners and I like that the kids have more guidance. I found another set of examples here, although most of them won't work very well for my students for a variety of reasons. But it is still a great option!

I love these text structure posters. I added them to my focus wall (which has been revised, like everything else.) The posters hit 5 of the major text structures. There isn't a poster for Question & Answer or for Narrative. I have been considering making one, especially for Narrative. There is so much text written in this structure - but narrative is different sometimes for fiction and nonfiction. It might be a midnight project sometime. :)

You can find my Teaching Ideas board on Pinterest - it is linked to my personal Twitter account.  Are you on Pinterest?  What great ideas have you discovered?

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