The Teaching Thief: Getting Started with Metacognition. Y'all my office smells like something died. Seriously! It started about two weeks ago. I walked in and got hit with a pretty putrid smell. So, naturally, I started to search. I looked everywhere and honestly, there are not that many places to look. My space consists of a work table, a desk, 2 bookshelves, and a small table for my printer. Nothing. I finally had to come to the conclusion that something has died in the wall.
Needless to say, I couldn't be in here all week. The good news is that the smell is improving thanks to a variety of air fresheners and those gel bead things that supposedly absorb bad odors. So, what have my 4th graders been working on lately? We started with that big word: METACOGNITION or the process of thinking about your thinking. This video does a great job explaining metacognition and the importance of teaching it to our students.
We go very slow and I do a lot of modeling of metacognition through reading aloud both picture and chapters books. How to Get Started: Home - Start Empathy. How to Create a Caring Classroom. Creating a Caring Classroom starts on the very first day of school. I think the most important thing a teacher can do that first week is to establish a warm and caring atmosphere in his or her classroom. You'll need to build an atmosphere of trust, where students can feel free to be themselves without worrying that classmates will make fun of them. At the same time, you'll want to establish clear expectations for acceptable behavior right from the very beginning. There are many ways to accomplish these goals, and I'm going to share a few of my favorites. If you're looking for the free webinar, Sowing the Seeds of Success, you'll find it at the end of the page.
Featured Caring Classroom Freebies Seating Arrangements and Team Formation Many people ask me when I form my CL teams. Personally, I start off on Day 1 with the kids in random teams (since I don't know enough about them to form heterogeneous teams). Classroom Management Ideas Teambuilding 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Classbuilding 1. 2. 3. Essential agreement… | What Ed Said. In a PYP school, every working group (teachers or students) starts off by creating an ‘essential agreement’. In the classroom, this means that, rather than teachers imposing rules, everyone works collaboratively to establish an agreement of how the class will function.
Today Jocelyn and I developed our class essential agreement. We started by asking the children to consider carefully and then write down what helps them learn and what hinders their learning. The next step was to share with a partner and find the things they had in common. The wordle shows the key words from the students’ original list of what helps them to learn. PYP Key Concept: Function.
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