Bond with James: January 2017

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Saturday Strategy: Anticipatory Guides

Here's an instructional strategy to help active your students prior knowledge. It also serves as a great pre-assessment tool to help inform your instruction over various concepts. This strategy may be adapted for all grade levels. 



Partial video transcript:
An anticipatory guide is a great way to activate prior knowledge for students. The way this works is, as you see here, this is an example, but I believe there are many different ways that you can do it. But the overall gist is that you give students this before they read a selected text that you've picked out. There are several statements. 

So, on this one, there six examples; some of them true, some of them false. They [students] just go through where it says your opinion and they check whether they agree with the statement or they disagree. 

Once they are finished, you give them a reading and they read through it, then they go back. And based on what they read, they will either tell me whether the reading agreed with their original opinion, or it disagreed with their original opinion. If it agreed, then they don't have to do anything. However, if the reading disagreed with their opinion, then they need to come to this little section right here, this little column, and they need to provide evidence in their own words to explain why the reading disagreed with them. 

Now, in the past, when I've done this before, they [students] would try to get out of this part by going back and trying to erase it. So what I have them do now, is I have them use either a pen, or marker, or colored pencil, and they have to color in, or shade it in. If, for example, they decide before they read something that they want to change, then they need to call me over and I will initial off so that way they can't go back and try to erase it. Initially that's what they would try to do when I first started doing it anticipatory guides - is that they wanted to get out of the work trying to find the evidence and they would try to go back and erase this. 

It's just a quick way for you to pre-assess your students to see what they know about a topic and then you can use that information to drive your instruction. So, that is an anticipatory guide. I hope you like it. If there's anything about this video that you liked, or resonated with you, make sure to LIKE, comment, or share the video. And if you haven't already subscribed, make sure to do that so that way you can "Bond with James". As always thanks for watching!


Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Stop Making Excuses! Podcast Interview


I had the opportunity to take part in a podcast interview with Fred and Sharon Jaravata at Teaching Bites as part of their Teacher-Author series.  I was their second interview in the series and I had a great time sharing my story. If you're interested in becoming a teacher-author - then this is for you! 

Saturday, January 7, 2017

Saturday Strategy: Counting Atoms for Interactive Notebooks (Overview)

The Counting Atoms for Interactive Notebooks is a FREE item in my store.  I wanted to take a few minutes to give a quick overview of how I utilize it in my classroom in case anyone had questions.  Feel free to leave a comment here or on the actual video. Start at the 0.15 second mark (as I had to use a filler for the Facebook LIVE intro to set up).