SIOP Saturday 5: Strategies

What a whirlwind week!  We started our curriculum, and switching for math, and my ESL block this week, so things have been rather hectic, and I haven't had time to post!  And now already it's Saturday again, so we're back to SIOP!

Today is highlighting the fourth component of the SIOP model: strategies!

Here's where we stand within the framework:

Lesson Preparation
Building Background
Comprehensible Input
Strategies
Interaction
Practice/Application
Lesson Delivery
Review/Assessment

This section about strategies provides resources for teachers as far as what they can do to help students connect to knowledge, problem-solve, and retain new information. This component contains the next three features:

13. Ample opportunities provided for students to use learning strategies
Many researchers have found that students are more successful when teachers explicitly and carefully teach self-regulating strategies to students.  There are three different types of learning strategies:

Metacognitive: strategies used for monitoring thinking (including predicting, self-questioning, monitoring, evaluating, summarizing, visualizing, inferring, and clarifying)
Cognitive: strategies that help students organize information (including rereading, highlighting, reading aloud, taking notes, mapping information, self-talk, finding key vocabulary, and using mneumonics)
Social/Affective: strategies that facilitate learning through interaction (including questioning for clarification, cooperative learning to solve problems, talking to someone, and group discussions)

These strategies should all be taught through explicit instruction and modeling, as well as teaching students HOW and WHEN to use each strategy.

14. Scaffolding techniques consistently used, assisting and supporting student understanding
Scaffolding is a term widely associated with Vygotsky's ZPD (zone of proximal development - when the student is in that "just-right" stage of learning and can accomplish a task alone, but it's not too easy for the student).  Teachers can help by providing three types of scaffolding for their students:

Verbal scaffolding: using prompting, questioning, and elaboration to facilitate students in reaching higher levels of thinking and language proficiency (including paraphrasing, using "think-alouds", and slowing speech and phrasing)

Procedural scaffolding: using explicit teaching and modeling, and giving opportunities for students to interact with each other and with the teacher to practice

Instructional scaffolding: preparing students in advance for the material they will learn (including using graphic organizers or any other instructional tools)

15. A variety of questions or tasks that promote higher-order thinking skills
Because it is difficult for teachers to think of these higher-order thinking questions off the cuff, teachers should prepare them prior to teaching the lesson.  Teachers can help students become strategic at recognizing the levels of questions, and what they would have to do to find the answer (this is basically QAR, Question-Answer Relationships, and recognizing if questions can be answered by looking in one place in a text ("right-there"), or that require more thought and searching through the text ("think and search").

SOME ACTIVITIES TEACHERS CAN USE THAT  SUPPORT LEARNING STRATEGIES:
*SQP2RS ("Squeepers"): teaching students to Survey, Question, Predict, Read, Respond, and Summarize when interacting with expository texts.
*GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Texts): after reading a text, students underline ten or more words or concepts that are deemed "most important" to understanding the text.  Write a summary sentence or two using as many words/concepts from the list as possible.  After finishing, students can write a topic sentence, and the end result can be used as a summary paragraph.
*DRTA (Directed Reading-Thinking Activity): a strategy that can be used when reading fiction texts.  Preview the story, make predictions, and stop periodically through the text to confirm predictions, make new ones, and think about/question what is happening in the story.

What other strategies do you use to help promote student learning in your classroom?

Next Saturday's topic: Interaction

Cranium club - with printables!

So I want to share with you today the idea that I discovered earlier this spring that has made me SO EXCITED to be moving to an upper elementary grade!! (Though I'm sure you younger-grade teachers can find a way to adapt this to your learners if you so choose!)  It's an idea called Cranium Club, or Mastery Club, or any other variation, depending on how the teacher decides to name it!

I stumbled across a few different versions on pinterest, including a version by Mrs. Renz and a version by Leslie at Jack of all Trades (and just now happened to stumble across a version by Amanda at Teaching Maddeness), and completely fell in love with the concept.  It's a standing answer to the "what can I do, I'm all finished?" question from those fast-finishers, which is something I'm always looking to find!

I was also drawn to this idea because it reminds me quite a bit of a similar ploy used by my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher.  She had special puzzles called "quizzles" that she offered for us to do...probably for extra credit or the like.  I just remember that she told me at the end of the year that I was the only student who completed all 50 of them! :)

Back to Cranium Club though...basically in a nutshell, students have a list of "challenges" that they can choose to complete - participation is entirely optional.  Students can choose any of the challenges to work on, in any order, and can do so on their own time - at home, recess, or if they finish work early.  They have to memorize their answer to the challenge (with the exception of a few challenges that require special recording sheets) and can give their answer to the teacher before or after school, during recess, or any other free moment during the day, at the teacher's discretion.

With my version, I decided to expand it to 100 questions instead of 80-odd questions.  100 just seems like a  more finished number, in my opinion!  In my version, if students complete 15 challenges, they become a Cranium Club member, and get to have their name added to the "Hall of Fame".  Completing 25 challenges earns them "silver member" status, and 50 complete challenges earns them "gold member" status, which I will mark by their name with stickers of that color.

Here are a few pictures of what I am using to implement it and keep track of student participation:

These were printed on cardstock and laminated - I'll display these on a cabinet or wall (I wish I knew what my classroom layout looks like!!).  One page lists the rules, then there are 5 pages with challenges divided by subject category, one title sign, and my hall of fame (super stars) sign

My cranium club materials share a binder with my classroom economy (which I will post about soon).  The first page I have is a list of all the challenges - same as on the posters, just condensed to one page!  I will copy this page and give it to my students so they have a reference of the challenges available to them.

Following the list of challenges, I have pages where I will mark which challenges each student has completed.

For some of the challenges, I created cheat-sheets with the answers (or a variety of possible answers, for more open-ended questions).  I keep these answers in the binder too in case I need a reference!

I'm taking my next big blogging step, and learning tonight how to link files directly to my site so that any of you who are interested can download them!  With this post, I'm attaching my page that has the rules, as well as a list of the 100 challenges that I have decided to incorporate.  They are based off challenges I saw used for a 4th grade class.  As I mentioned, I added a few extra to make it an even 100, and I also had to tweak them (changing some of the state-specific challenges, and I also changed one of the counting languages to Chinese instead of Spanish (because that would be way too easy for my kids!)

So...here ya go! Enjoy! (Please please please let the links work!!)

Cranium Club rules

List of Cranium Club challenges

Since this is a new idea to me, I obviously haven't implemented it in a classroom yet!  Do any of you have experience with a similar "club" in your classroom?