Month: February 2024

Activities and Curricular Connections 2

On 21 February 2024

UFLI

In the grade 1 class I have been visiting for the past 3 weeks, they started each morning with a UFLI lesson. The way this teacher organized her teaching of UFLI honestly blew me away. The students knew the routine and she dealt with little to no behaviors each time I was in.

First, the students would gather on the carpet at the front of the room and participate in the lesson taught and shown on board. The portion of the lesson you see here is the students reading the word on the board and then the teacher would go “what does it say if we take away the st?”

Then, the students would head back to their tables and listen for words or sounds being called out to write on their individual whiteboards. This carpet-to-desk transition would happen about 3 times throughout the lesson and not once was there an issue with students getting off task.

I also wanted to note the phonics display bulletin board in this classroom. It is a great visual for students to help with sounding out and pronouncing sounds. I really liked how this teacher covered up the ones they have not gotten to yet as I believe it helps students not get confused or overwhelmed.

UFLI in the Grade One Curriculum

BIG IDEA:

“Through listening and speaking, we connect with others and share our world.”

I believe for this specific UFLI lesson where the students were learning phonics and spelling, that they are connecting what they hear and what they repeat back to their peers and the real world. Example student quote after sounding out the word “ring”: “ring! my mummy wears a ring”

CURRICULAR COMPETENCY:

“Engage actively as listeners, viewers, and readers”

Throughout the entirety of this lesson, each student demonstrated active listening, viewing, and reading of what was being asked of them and what was being shown to them.

CONTENT:

“Oral language strategies:” Students were orally sounding out words and saying letter sounds.

“Metacognitive strategies:” Students were developing awareness of their selves as learners.

“Phonemic and phonological awareness”

100th Day of School!

I got lucky and this visit happened to be on the 100th day of school!

As you can see, one of the activities the class did was complete a “When I am 100 Years Old” worksheet. I really liked how this teacher did a guided drawing for the portrait and they created a list of answers on the board as a class to refer to. I enjoyed circulating around the room while students completed the worksheet and talking to them about their choices!

100th Day Curricular Connections

BIG IDEA:

“Everyone has a unique story to share:” Students were able to showcase how they envision their life at 100 years old and hear stories about the older generations from their teacher.

CURRICULAR COMPETENCY:

“Exchange ideas and perspectives:” Students were to share their ideas with the class when creating the list of answer options.

CONTENT:

“letter formation; legible printing with spacing between letters and words.”

STORY VINES!

by cmassier

On 17 February 2024

In Literacy

Story vines are a creative way for students to showcase their comprehension and story re-telling skills by creating a physical depiction of the story. Give students yarn and other art supplies to create a vine of the story! According to Robin Bright in Sometimes Reading Is Hard, story vines are meant to “develop students’ reading skills while collaborating and contributing to meaningful classroom talk” (Bright, 2021).

Indigenous Perspective

The use of story vines fits beautifully into the First Peoples Principals of Learning.

*Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story:

After the students create their story vines, they are to re-tell the story out loud. An article by Cassidy Taylor, MLIS. discusses the importance of oral storytelling and how it connects us to each other as well as our place.

I feel it is important to make this known to students when doing this activity in the classroom.

The Paper Bag Princess Story Vine

This is a digital story vine I created for the book The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. The cool thing about story vines is that they can be created with yarn and art supplies, but also digitally using platforms like Canva.

Re-telling the Story with my Story Vine

There once was a beautiful Princess who wore a stunning dress and had plans to marry the majestic Prince Ronald.

One day, a big fire-breathing dragon came along and burnt down the Princess’ castle. Burning all her dresses and kidnapping Prince Ronald.

All she had left to wear was a brown paper bag. Filled with anger, the Princess made her way to the dragons’ cave to save the Prince.

Once she arrived at the cave, she manipulated the dragon and tired him out to the point where he passed out from exhaustion. This was her chance to save Prince Ronlad and finally get married!

When she managed to find and release the Prince, he did not react how she expected. He was hung up on the fact that she was dirty and wearing a paper bag. He was disgusted and made that known to her.

Instead of getting upset, she called the Prince a bum and ran off into the sunset. The two did not get married.

What I just did shows exactly how I would digitally use story vines in my classroom. I definitely prefer the physical way because of the oral storytelling aspect and the way it is hands-on and more fun for the students. This is definitely an activity I will be using in my classroom one day!

AI In Education!

by cmassier

On 7 February 2024

In Literacy

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rocked the world with its abilities. In education it can be a helpful tool, but also a potentially harmful one. The ethics of AI use have been discussed and my opinion is in (almost) full support of its use. There are many ways AI can be used in education, by students and by teachers. I was able to explore a few AI tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and MagicSchool. In this post, I am going to focus on MagicSchool as it is the newest one to me.

MagicSchool is an AI platform that has MANY tools. I only explored the teacher version, but there is also a student version. The top tools that interested me were the chatbot (similar to ChatGPT), the report card comment generator, the text summarizer, and the unit/lesson plan generator. As mentioned before, there are many, many more.

Report Card Comment Generator

The report card comment generator is simple and easy to use. The products it produces are definitely usable and can take a huge weight off of teachers’ backs when report card season rolls around. In my opinion, I believe it is difficult to get a personal enough comment from AI, but it can provide a really nice framework and cut the comment-writing process down significantly.

Text Summarizer

For the text summarizer, I tested it out by copying and pasting a paragraph from Wikipedia on why we get so much snow in Canada and asked it to summarize it into 5 bullet points. It did a really great job and provided exactly what I asked for. I feel that this tool is definitely useful for both students and teachers. The grade 5 ELA curriculum mentions previewing text; summarizing; making inferences and this can be an awesome tool to model summarizing and help get students started.

Unit Plan Generator

The unit plan generator is probably the most useful tool for teachers in my opinion. Even being a pre-service teacher, coming up with, and writing out unit plans can be grueling. Having something like this to help with the process can be a game changer. Let me show you what it created for a grade 5 unit on simple machines.

In the photo above, you will see that I put in very little information for it to go off of. Here is what it generated for me:

As you can see, it produced a very vague base of a unit to get a teacher started. While it did not create a detailed, ready-to-use unit, it created a base that can still cut the unit planning time by almost half.

Is it Easier to Just use ChatGPT?

When I asked ChatGPT to create a unit on simple machines, It produced a more detailed and almost ready-to-use unit. While MagicSchool is better organized, ChatGPT can do all the same things and in my opinion, it does it better. Here is the simple machine unit it created:

Will I Use These in My Teaching Career?

YES!

These are some really awesome tools that I believe will make my teaching life a heck of a lot easier. While I know I will for sure use ChatGPT and MagicSchool, I am also interested in looking into HeyGen (AI video creator), SciSpace (explains research articles), and Tutor.ai (answer generator).

Activities and Curriculum Connections

by cmassier

On 1 February 2024

In Literacy

Project Read AI

Project Read AI is a new website that schools can sign up for to promote phonetic awareness and comprehension. This site is considered similar to UFLI, but also useable for intermediate levels. I saw it being used in grade 5. Students log in using their class code and select their name to begin. An automated voice will give the student(s) verbal instructions like “Read me this sentence” and then the students are to record themselves reading it aloud. The program will listen to the student saying it and find which words the student needs more practice on and give tips and have them repeat it.

The use of this program connects to the BC English Language Arts Curriculum in a couple of different ways.

Curriculum Connections

Curricular compatancies:

-The use of a variety of comprehension skills. For intermediate students, this program can activate some prior knowledge of phonics they learned in previous grades. This can also help them make connections and actually understand the words they are reading.

-Apply a variety of thinking skills. Working with this new program requires the students to explore another way of learning.

Content:

-Reading strategies. Using phonics and word structure; visualizing.

Chairs on Strike!!

Uh Oh! All of the chairs have gone on strike! The only way for the students to get their chairs back is if they can write a convincing enough persuasive paragraph.

As students walked into their classroom first thing this morning they were greeted with their chairs covered in caution tape, with a note attached, and were required to sit on the floor or on top of their desks until the writing block. (what a fun way to get students thinking and to start the day!)

This poster was put up on the board for students to use as a reference when writing their paragraph about why they should get their chairs back, or why they don’t want their chairs back (most wanted the chairs back). Having this up as a reference will help deter students from just using “and then”, “because”, etc. Creating more variety in their writing.

Curriculum Connections

Curricular Compatancies:

-Identifying opinions and viewpoints, and asking clarifying questions. Students were to decide whether or not they wanted to argue for their chairs back or not and ask to find out what caused the strike!

-Planning, drafting, and editing compositions in a range of forms (e.g., opinion pieces). Students first made their decisions, then hand-wrote their paragraph draft, and lastly typed out their final copy, making any edits they saw fit along the way.

-Communicate in writing, using legible handwriting or a keyboard to convey texts

Content:

-Perspective/point of view

-Paragraphing

Student Examples: