Inside Circle, Outside Circle: Meaningful Discussions that Force All Kids to Participate (and involve movement)

I love listening to my kids have discussions in class and this method of inside circle, outside circle is really incredible for upping the engagement in your classroom.
The first step in this process is giving students a question to answer on their own, at their desk without talking. I have students write their answers on an index card or blank paper. Then, after every has had enough quiet time to talk, I go around to the 8 tables in my room and choose 1 kid from each table to form the center circle.
Next, we form an outside circle and an inside circle. The 8 kids I chose go on the inside and the others are on the outside. Everyone has their paper where they wrote the answers and a pencil. We all face the inside and there are 2 circles: an onside one and an outside one.
The people on the inside begin sharing their answers to whatever the question was. They have them written down, so they have had time to think about their responses and that makes them more comfortable sharing.
While they are sharing, the people on the outside are taking notes about what is being said. I give them a focus of what to be looking for.
The first time we did this activity, I gave them a prompt to explain why learning to read and write is beneficial to them now or in the future. So, the outside circle focused on finding someone from the inside that they agreed with and someone they disagreed with. They also had to explain why and provide examples. This reminds me of an online discussion board. I really liked it.
Once all 8 of the inside people told their thoughts, the outside people began sharing their notes about who they agreed with and who they disagreed with. I did this with my 8th grade and I did not call on them to go. They shared without interrupting each other and the did a great job. I had a chart with each kids name on it and, as they shared, I marked them off for participation. They knew I was doing this and that was how they received a grade for this discussion.
Instead of agreeing and disagreeing with each other, they could also reply in other ways. What I love about this activity is that students are forced to listen to each other because they have to use what the other students say in their own response.
Something I am trying this week is to have students answer a question about the reading for the first part. Then, in the inside circle, outside circle discussion, they will choose a student's point and reply by adding more evidence to support the point.
Another way I plan to use this discussion method is to choose 6 students, one for each vocabulary word, and have them, create a sentence with that word. These 6 students will be in the center and share their sentences. Then, the other students will choose a word and explain if they think the student with that word used it correctly. Then, they will use the same sentence as the person on the inside, but they will alter the sentence and use a synonym (or another variation) where the sentence means the same as the vocabulary word. Then, a different person from the outside will do this again and again to show the different ways the vocabulary word can be phrased. This also helps with associating the vocabulary word with other words, which helps students make connections and allows for more meaningful learning.

Using Blackout Poems to Help Teach Point-of-View

I really feel like this week has been an incredible teaching week! I am so proud of what my students have accomplished this week and it makes me giddy about next week!
One activity that we did this week that I have never tried before in my classes was a blackout poem.  We studied point-of-view and the story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in my 8th grade class and they kids did so great with it and we all loved Walter Mitty.  So, Friday is always a really difficult day to plan because you don't want to start something new, but you don't want to do nothing.  Right?  So after we had our vocabulary quiz and our reading time, we did a blackout poem.

This is how the instructions went:
1. First, I need you to pick one of the following characters: Mitty or his wife
(These were the two main characters of our story, so I had them pick one in order to use that character's point-of-view.
2.  Now, write that character's name at the top of your paper.  You are now that person.
3.  Now, use your pencil and go through the sheet that you chose from the story and lightly circle the words that you want to create a story that somehow represents the character you chose.  So, for Walter Mitty's character, they might choose to use the words to create a new daydream that he is having.  Or for his wife, they might choose to use the words to create something that she is telling Walter to buy at the store.
4,  After the students carefully circled the words that make up their story and are satisfied, they used a black marker to black out the rest of the words.
My kids LOVED this! They were so quiet doing this you would have thought it was a test! They even asked if we were going to do this every Friday.  Score!  I love when I find something they love and I can sneak in some learning on them.

This is fun and meets the 8th grade standards as well.  We took some notes this week on the different types of point-of-view and analyzed the points-of-view of various texts as well.  This was just the icing on the cake and I can't wait to read all those wonderful poems to see just how creative they can be.  I also had them label at the top of the paper what point-of-view they were writing in.  For example, did they tell Walter Mitty's story in 1st person? Or was it 3rd person omniscient?

These are some examples of a practice one with less rules.  Since we didn't finish, I don't have photos of the ones we made today, but I will be getting those on here soon!

Teaching Vocabulary: The Best Practices

Today was a great Monday in my classroom!  We start class with 20 minutes of independent reading, and so far, that is going great.  I set the standards high and I hope that will holdout throughout the school year.  After the 20 minutes of reading, we record our reading on the Status of the Class form that I found in the book called The Book Whisperer.  Next, we go over the mentor sentence of the week and notice the qualities that make it our mentor sentence.  Finally, we do the vocabulary portion of the class.  So, I decided that, on Mondays, I will give the students all of the vocabulary words and that will take the place of the "lesson" for that day.  Today, that worked perfectly.
So, we all get out our little dictionaries that we made.  This is a folder with prongs in the middle and pockets. We put paper in the middle and, on each page, we wrote a letter of the alphabet to create a dictionary for each student.  Today, we had 5 words for the week for the 7th grade and 6 words for the 8th grade students.  These words come from the story that we will be reading this week.  I give the students the word, part of speech, correct definition that goes with our text, and a good example sentence.  Many teachers think that the students should look up the words on their own, but I prefer to give this to the students so that I know they have the correct definition and sentence.  They write all of this in their dictionary under that word's entry.  Then, I follow a little "script" that I found online that worked wonderfully!
Here is how the script went:
1. The word is ______.  What is the word? (I make the students say the word aloud to ensure they can say it properly.)
2. The defintion of _________ is __________________. (Again, they read it aloud. I make them redo it until they are all saying it.)
3. Let's look at our sentence. (I read the sentence again.)
4. Talk at your tables and figure out another way we could say this word in the sentence. (I make sure to tell students that this word does not have to be a synonym of the word.  This is to make sure that students have an idea of what the word means and can replace it to make the same sentence make sense.)
5. Then, we share what they talked about at theit tables.
6. At the end, I try to think of a higher order question that goes with the word. So, if the word was faulty, I might ask: what are other things that can be faulty? This really makes them (and me) think about the word.

So, we did this with all 5 of the 7th grade words and then all 6 of the 8th grade words.  It took some time, but I feel that the time was well-spent and I hope to see great improvements on their vocabulary development from these vocabulary practices.
Tomorrow, we will begin doing some paper-and-pencil activites that are Marzano-approved.
I will be sharing these soon!

Book Hunt

After searching for ways to get my students excited about reading, I found something that I like to call a book hunt.  I saw where another teacher did this and I kind of modified it to fit my classroom better.
When setting up our interactive notebooks, we created a page called our "Reading Wish List."  This is where we list the title and author of books we want to read.

One of the first days of school when students did not have a book yet because they had not been to the library, we did the book hunt.

Planning for the Book Hunt
The data that I used to guide my book hunt was "Getting to Know You" sheets that my students did the first day.  After sifting through the "Getting To Know You" information about each student, I compiled lists of topics that they liked.  Our librarian helped me find some of the latest books from our library and I used books from my personal library as well. I spread the books out and put one book at each seat in my classroom, even seats where no students sat.

Implementing the Book Hunt During Class
I asked students to get out their notebooks and turn to the wish list page.  I played music and allowed students to walk around the room and kind of look over the books until they found a place they'd like to sit down and spend more time with the book.  When I stopped the music, students were to sit down at the table they were in front of.  I set a timer for 2 minutes and students had 2 minutes with the book.  I told them to read the front and back covers, read the inside flaps, read some of the chapters, or even begin reading the book! Once the timer dinged, I would play the music again and students would write down the title and author of the book in their Reading Wish List if it was something they were interested in reading later.  Some students didn't even want to leave the table where they were sitting when the bell rang to switch.  We did this routine about 4-5 times and they kids really LOVED it!
In fact, see the post-it on the picture? Several kids wanted to take the book with them, but I had them put post-its on them with their name so they could come back and get it at the end of the day so other kids could look at that book as well.  And those kids came back to get their books, too!

Books on the tables for our
book hunt.

First Day of Interactive Notebooks

Today was the first day of interactive notebooks and I think it was a great success! I feel very confident with the work we have done so far in them.  We actually accomplished a lot in the 90 minutes that I have them.  It was slightly more difficult to get the students' pages coordinated with mine as far as having everything on the same page number and getting it organized correctly in the table of contents, but I know the hard work will pay off when the notebooks are orderly.  I am excited to see how this newfound organization will help my students learn.

It took a little time and a lot of demonstrating with my own example notebook to get our notebooks ready, but we did it!  One class even got finished early and I was able to do an "Example Notes" lesson with them. They were very curious to learn how we would use these notebooks.  The most helpful thing I learned from today is that I am glad I made a "Teacher Notebook" as an example.  It really helped them to see me do it along with them and this is a strategy that I will implement daily in my classroom!

Example Note-Taking Lesson

This is the reading list where
my students will record the
books that they read this year.
I found this gem in the book
Reading in the Wild by
Donalyn Miller.

This is the table of contents that I made for our
notebooks.  After all of my classes had taped it in, a sweet
student helped me realize that...I had misnumbered!
It was a sad moment, but then, we just scratched them
out and corrected them.

I had thought that we would have enough time to decorate our notebooks by pasting clippings from magazines on the front cover (and maybe the back, too), but we didn't get to do this yet! I do still hope to do this.  Maybe on Monday.  Decorating the notebooks really allows the kids to personalize them and I honestly think it allows them to engage with my class more.  It is something that is personal to them and that makes it more meaningful.  I had been told this before, but I had never really believed it until I saw it for myself. Having something of their own, even if it is just a notebook, is important for middle school kids.  I can't wait to see how these notebooks affect my teaching and their learning!

Tips to Make Your Word Wall Beneficial & Functional

Today, we started back with our first "teacher day" and it was the first day that I have worked on my room since last year.  The main thing I got accomplished was getting my word wall laminated (thanks to our awesome librarian) and hung up in my room.  I also cleaned the tables and got them all in order along with my own desk.  While everything is still in the boxes I packed at the end of last year, I will get all of that cleaned up and put up tomorrow.

This is my word wall that I put up today. I kind of love how it
turned out. <3

While hanging up my word wall, I realized some pointers that I wanted to share with you guys in an attempt to make it easier for you than it was for me.

1. Make sure your letters are large enough to see from across the classroom.

2. Laminate the cards or letters that you will stick to the wall.

3. Make sure you have enough room on the wall.  If not, you can get creative and put it on two walls like I did. I kind of like how it looks.

4.  Make sure that you can reach the word wall to easily put words on and take them off.  Make sure the kids can reach it, too, so that they can interact and play the word wall games.

5.  Try to position the word wall in a place that does not have desks in front of it.  I am going to be moving those desks in my picture.  I know this isn't always 100% possible, but do the best you can.

Two years ago, I had my wonderful husband hang letters perfectly around the top of my classroom. THE TOP! I could not reach it and none of my students (even the 6 foot kids) could reach any of the letters or the words.  So, this word wall failed miserably.  So, all of that to say that, even though the word wall might be cute and look great in your classroom, it must be functional to be beneficial for your kids.

I can't wait to add words to my wall.
If you have any tips, share them in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.