CGI

I know most of my posts have been about literacy, but....I am also a math teacher! I know,  big surprise! I have started taking a 3 year course called CGI or Cognitively Guided Instruction. It has really changed the way I teach math. It involves a lot of problem solving and a different way of thinking about numbers. When we talk about putting kids in a sense of disequilibrium when we are teaching them that is exactly how CGI makes me feel. But the thinking coming out of my kids..amazing!

Well we were continuing that journey this week. At CGI this week we were focusing on 2 digit addition and fact fluency.  To give you a little background any time I have ever gone to CGI it has been complete brain overload! I seriously have a enormous headache after each day....tears....frustration. It totally puts you in the perspective of your "kids." I totally feel their pain! Well I was really ok until they started talking about negative numbers in 1st and 2nd grade...then the pain began again! I just don't think I am ready for that....


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The 2nd day we worked on fact fluency. It was really great! It totally helped to tie some loose ends together. I saw a teacher do a number talk and see all the amazing ways different children solve problems and how to push them to the next level without actually telling them how to solve the problem. We learned how to give a math fact inventory to see exactly how they solved the problems. It was something I went back and tried in my classroom the next day! It is definitely a journey, but I think that it will be worth the work.  

Ruby Bridges...

We are wrapping up our unit on "The Long Road to Freedom" this week.  I really wish we had more time to focus on some different important people...Ruby Bridges. I really think the kids would be able to relate to her so much better if we had some additional time. I know I learned about her as a child, but now I look back at it as a teacher of 7 and 8 years old...a mom of a 6 year old...a grown up...It is just beyond me how such a little girl was able to survive such persucution. We started our study with this video .  Wow! The first time I watched it I had tears in my eyes. After we watched that we did a quick write on "How we would feel if we were Ruby Bridges." It was interesting to see how different students reacted to the question. After we shared our thougts we watched the "real" Ruby Bridges talk about her experiences.

Several different opinions on what they would do if they were Ruby Bridges.

Similar and Different

We have been reading all about the Civil Rights Movement as a ending to our 4th unit in the common core units. This week we worked on the beginning of the "sit in" movement with the Freedom on the Menu and Sit ins.

We read each of the books and made connections between this protest movement and slavery. Using Freedom on the Menu, we worked on our 3 important questions "What does it say?", "What does it mean?" and "What does it matter?" We used our "What does it say?" to practice summarizing and "What does it mean?" to practice inferencing using characters feelings.  The final part "What does it mean?" was a chance for them to practice author's big idea or what the author is trying to teach us. The funny part is that most of the kids struggled with "What does it mean?"

 The next step we worked on was comparing the two stories and what was similar and different between the two of them.  We recently went to a conference and learned that our kids need a chance to struggle with "frustration" level text. This was a difficult concept for me to get.  As a teacher who has been trained in "instructional" and  "independent" level texts it was a struggle, but looking at how some kids have not had their reading levels increase at the level I wanted I was willing to try anything. So we have worked on giving them a chance to struggle through and then using that text as evidence for writing about their thinking. So they got a sample of text from each book and then write about how it was different.

Mentor Authors

We begin our study of Ezra Jack Keats.  His books are simple and easy for 2nd graders to copy.  We pulled out A Snowy Day to begin our study.  We also watched a video where the "real" Ezra Jack Keats is talking about his ideas and where they come from. As a class we talked about where Keats might have gotten his ideas, we came up with "his ordinary life." We created a list of ordinary life topics we could write about. The next day we looked through Keats book A Letter To Amy.   The 2nd graders got into small groups and looked through his book as a group. The ideas they came up and are reflected in the anchor chart.