Good morning WHP community,
I have a question. For the last two years, I have been getting my feet wet with teaching Origins and 1750 courses. This year I am using 1200, but I have not used the unit problem or the vocab. How do you introduce these to your students?
Oh, I love, love love this question. Here's how we roll out vocab.
I always share a Quizlet link ahead of time - often before we even start the unit. This has the Unit vocabulary words and I'll gently encourage students to "beat my time" - which gets them clicking around a bit.
Then, Unit vocab words always (ALWAYS) go up on the board as a word wall. They're always visible to all students. In class, near the beginning of the Unit we always do a vocabulary game. This is often in the form of Gimkit or Quizlet Live. This gets students exposed to the words, playing around with them, learning, and hopefully having a bit of fun.
Then, later in the Unit, we do an individual vocabulary assignment. Typically a Gimkit assignment that students need to work through. As we move through the Unit, students are required to use the Unit vocabulary in their assignments and formative assessments (exit tickets, daily journals, whatever) - again, getting some more practice.
When it comes time for the summative assessment, vocabulary usage is again required. I really, REALLY, need students to be using those words.
To your question - the vocabulary is extremely well aligned to the Unit Problem / EQ / DQ. In fact, I would argue (as a teacher) that it is impossible to respond to the Unit Problem / EQ / DQ without using the Unit vocab.
John Mason probably has some other ideas, too!
Thanks Erik! I had this same question!
Erik Christensen , thanks for the tag! I shared some of my evolving thinking on how to teach vocabulary over in this thread which has some real gems from some other folks here, too.
I think something Erik has really nailed, too, is giving adequate time to introduce and practice some of the critical vocabulary while also requiring that some of the terms are used in an upcoming assignment.
In the upcoming year I am using Gimkit to have students practice and get introduced to some of the words prior to the start of a given Era and then am going to have students responsible for working on a frayer model for a 'priority' word in a particular era. I also always make time for some review games and love using some of the options from Gimkit but honestly nothing has ever been as popular as playing Grudgeball in class which I can't wait to reintroduce to students since I will have most of my kids in person. Both of these are also great ways to practice vocabulary.
For the Unit Problem my plan for the upcoming year is to reflect upon this using some different Visible Thinking Routines from Project Zero. In particular I plan on using:
I decided to use these since I already plan on using them in other contexts and, unsurprisingly, to continue to make these similar types of thinking 'visible' in different ways throughout the year. As for introducing the question, too, I find most students have heard of an 'essential question' at some point in their educational career so I'll link on to this as being similar. If they are unfamiliar with this idea I focus on the question as a sort of summary of the 'So, what?' of the entire unit. In other words, why would I focus on this instead of something else?
John Mason can you explain "Grudgeball?" Sounds fun!
I've made a Quizizz with the Unit 1 vocab and added political, social, economic, and cultural to it. Feel free to use it: quizizz.com/.../61267b6b092ba8001dd8dbe6
Awesome! love me some Quizizz! Thanks! You will probably see some from me in the bank in upcoming units! I just added "Causation" to the word wall and had the entire class try to come up with a definition after we did the Alphonse activity. What we came up with went on a card on the wall under the word. To get the word wall, I put kids in groups and gave each group two or four cards. One card is for them to write the word and the other card is for the definition. If they have four people, they get two words, so everybody either gets to write a word or a definition. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X8suP5lTrN_8x0C7kDNcjhar0blcF7JS/view?usp=sharing.
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I'm going to steal your idea for the Word Wall. Love those posters two on the Frames. Where did you get those? Dominique Scaief
Great Scott! (lol!) I dug around and found the posters in the OER website under teacher resources. Click on your profile dot from the main page/ teacher resources/ WHP posters. I had them printed at Office Depot. Picked them up the same day and it was less than $5 for all of them. Hint: they accidentally printed two sets, so they just gave me the second one. I'm glad because I'm going to laminate the second set. It gives me something to hand to the kids as they are in groups to say "concentrate on this frame," or "How does it answer that question?" Here's the link to the posters, just scroll down. www.oerproject.com/Teacher-Resources Scott Marsden
Thanks, Dominique! That's a great way to use the posters.
I'm trying not to have to pay to color print them, if possible!
First, sorry for the delay in my reply! I've been buckling down to prepare for the school year here in New Jersey which starts next week. First, Grudgeball is BY FAR my most favorite review game and the one that students have the most fun with each year. Also, full disclosure, I didn't make it up! I found it through a colleague but have made some small tweaks to make it my own. Here is a 3:30 minute screencast where I explain how it works. The google slides there are also the same one I share with the students when I am introducing it. Here is a link to the original site where I found it, too.
My other favorite game is something that I call Sizzlin Bacon, originally I found is here and it was called Stinky Feet, and I use pretty similar rules for this one. The main modifications I make are throwing in some real goofy and fun things such as 'name that tune' or 'dance challenges' as well as stealing points from other teams, giving points to other teams, score swaps, etc. I really like to encourage games where students can form temporary alliances, etc. since that tends to build the tension and community in the classroom. The main advantage to Sizzlin Bacon is that it actually ends up being totally random so you don't need to worry about a more academically inclined group always winning. I can also make a quick screencast that explains how I run this game in more detail but this also is extremely popular even more so than Kahoot or most other technology based games.
Hope this helps!
