Today we had an in service on learning communities in school. The goal of learning communities is to help an entire school work together and I fully support that goal. I found myself sitting with a different group of folks and it was so nice. As the newbie at such a large school I feel like there are tons of faces I don't yet know and for me that totally sucks. I want to know the folks with whom I work daily, I want to be able to talk with them about our students, help them with ideas or struggles they may have and I want to be able to go to them for help.
In thinking about helping each other I can't help but think of how we help our kids to learn and how we help ourselves teach. I'm not talking easy stuff either, I'm talking the tough concepts that even we have to look up before we teach. I have to do that all the time and I let my kids know I do it too.
Lately, my kids have been struggling with clauses of the independent and dependent type. For those of you nonELA teachers, an independent can be a sentence by itself and a dependent can't. Seems pretty simple right? Wrong!
I taught it once and many of them had a hard time on the quiz so to teach it again I had to go searching for a new way. I found a PowerPoint, one of my favorite tools, called "Sentences with the Simpsons" online. Perfect! The kids know those characters and can connect.
After going through the PPT I asked them to make sentences and "label" which was a Marge (independent) clause and which was a Homer (dependent) clause. They loved it and many of them were able to identify the parts more effectively. I'm hoping this time it sticks!
Without the chance to search and find what others are willing to share I'd till be trying to figure out how to reteach this concept so they get it. I love sharing! My mom would be so proud :)
See a picture of one group's sentences.
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