https://blogs.4j.lane.edu/chinn/?p=801
Hello Staff,
I hope everyone had an excellent Thanksgiving! And can you believe there are only three weeks until Winter Break? The year is passing by very fast!
Five items of note for this week.
• easyCBM Testing Updates – In case you missed some of the emails from downtown, last year Math benchmarking on a strictly voluntary basis, but this year Winter benchmarking will be done for all students in Math as we did in the Fall. Additionally, vocabulary will now be given online for 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students. The testing window is the two weeks before Winter Break, so plan accordingly. If you want help entering your scores, you will need to give me all of your scores by Friday, December 9th. After that date, teachers will be responsible for entering your own scores. Lastly, if you need a substitute to relieve you to test your students, they will once again be available to teachers. Please let me know if you have any questions.
• Website Wonders – Below are a few interesting links to educational websites you might use in the classroom:
Google Art Project – Google continues to branch out. Here’s a new art project with extraordinary resources.
Real-world math – In this website, math teacher Thomas Petra shares practical math lessons, lesson ideas, examples, and downloads, including how to find the volume of the Great Pyramids of Giza, converting currency, working with time zones, and tracking a storm’s progress.
Khan Academy – In this website you can learn almost anything at your own pace. There are videos included. Would be a great tool for TAG students to take advantage of for their extended learning opportunities.
Teaching Diverse Students Initiative – This is a part of the Teaching Tolerance website. I know many of you are familiar with it, but sometimes it helps to have a reminder about the great resources here.
• Annual EEA Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Essay and Poetry Contest – EEA is once again sponsoring their annual MLK essay and poetry contest. This year’s elementary prompt is “Martin Luther King Jr. believed in peace and that all people should be able to get along with each other. Write a poem about peace and mutual respect to honor Martin Luther King Jr.” See the Contest Flyer for details, but the deadline for submissions is Tuesday, January 10th.
• Short Article – Why teachers should determine which students work together – Teachers, not students, should determine which students work together in groups, says instructional coach David Ginsburg. In this blog, he writes teachers are better equipped to strategically match students based in part on their skills, teamwork abilities, behavior and other qualities. He encourages teachers to form diverse groups.
• Jay Smooth on Constructive Conversations About Race (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race) – Jay Smooth, of Ill Doctrine, recently gave an excellent Tedx talk at Hampshire College about the difficulties of talking constructively about race and racism in the U.S. These conversations are tricky to navigate because they often devolve from discussions about structural inequalities and the consequences of certain positions or policies to individualistic arguments about whether a specific person is racist. As he points out, this backs people into corners, because people are extremely defensive at anything they see as an accusation they are racist, there is little room to listen to someone who challenges a comment, and perhaps then acknowledge that a statement was hurtful, or based on incorrect information, or connects to larger cultural discourses and structural inequalities that we might want to examine critically. It’s a great 11-minute video on how we might try to discuss race, and racism, constructively.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbdxeFcQtaU[/youtube]
Have a good one!
Allan