What should we do with these sticky notes? Is it getting worse? What does worse mean, anyway?3/3/2022 By Taylor Amundson, DMS 6th ELA, and Carole Sand, DMS TAG & Collaborative Teacher What should we do with these sticky notes? Is it getting worse? What does worse mean, anyway? Sometimes the best ideas happen “in the moment.” These occur in our classrooms every day when students ask questions, share ideas, or toss out random comments. As teachers, it’s tricky to figure out when we should capitalize on these teachable moments and when we need to stay the course. In Mrs. Amundson’s 6th grade ELP reading class recently, the decision to take advantage of teachable moments paid off by spurring active learning and higher student engagement. After learning about personification, idioms, metaphors, and other figurative language, Amundson’s first hour students read a short story and applied their learning by working with a partner to use Post-it notes to record examples. After sharing their findings, a student asked a simple question – “What should we do with these sticky notes?” In the moment, the teachers suggested: “Stick them on the cabinets.” Second hour students immediately noticed and were curious about the sticky notes and became very motivated to find as many, or more, examples than the previous class. You can bet that they and students throughout the day were highly engaged when they read the story to see how many examples of figurative language they could find. The photo tells you the rest of the story. On a different day, after reading several stories and poems about natural disasters, a student asked, “Are natural disasters getting worse?” This prompted a discussion of different types of natural disasters. As the discussion progressed, another important question surfaced – “What does ‘worse’ mean with a natural disaster?” More frequent? More intense? More deadly?
We decided to search for our answers. Students broke into groups, chose a natural disaster, and looked for answers. They were very excited about their learning and wanted to share their work. This led to lessons on credible sources, paraphrasing, interpreting graphs, and understanding cause/effect. The final results were large posters, oral presentations, and excitement by all of the 6th grade classes. In the end, we learned that the meaning of ‘worse’ differs with each type of natural disaster but we did find they all had one main cause in common: global climate change. It’s hard to know when to take the plunge into teachable moments, but in these two cases we were glad that we did.
3 Comments
Tracy Maher
3/3/2022 06:34:45 pm
Nice job and very decorative, too!
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Stephanie Radloff
3/4/2022 06:11:58 am
What a great read! I appreciate how the students got engaged in each moment and were excited to learn more. It is so hard at times to get students engaged in learning so when the opportunity lands in your lap at the right moment it's a great success! I wished I could have been part of this watching the students and interacting with them as I'm sure it was a lot of fun and I would have learned much also.
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Karen Klotzbach
3/4/2022 06:33:41 am
Thank you for reminding us that there’s a teachable moment out there for all of us. Sensing and seizing those moments in our classrooms are unplanned and may take practice in noticing them during daily instruction. Capturing the attention of our students helps children to digest and remember the conversations and lessons because they are naturally more interested in the topic at hand and can feel their application to the world around them. Continue to strive everyday for those breakthrough moments that challenge and change the lives of your students.
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