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?
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!
John Mason can you explain "Grudgeball?" Sounds fun!
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!
This sounds great! I will definitely check out all of these games!
