Day One (PM): What Makes Us Amazing?
Essential Questions: What is Amazing? What is a Robot? What is Friendship?
SESSION OBJECTIVES:
For teachers to experience and understand how. . .
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Social interaction contributes to literacy learning - how interpretation is developed and refined through collaborative experiences around text.
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multisensory learning strategies support literacy development
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how chapter books can move beyond read-alouds to hands-on print experiences
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the goal of rubrics is to offer a set of vocabulary for students to create and assess high quality work
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multiple iterations of student work—with rubrics in place—levels up the quality of student work.
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curricula can be shaped around essential questions and big ideas
Kurt Wootton, author of A Reason to Read: Linking the Arts and LIteracy and Director of Habla Institute of Language and Culture, kicks off Summer 2019: Applied Literacy 201
Building Community
Robot Circle Cross
Community and trust are built simultaneously during the Robot Circle Cross. This new spin on Circle Cross connects to the content by inviting one person to close their eyes and move like a robot while a partner guides them as across the circle.
The Amazing, All-Knowing Robot
In groups of 6, participants created and named a robot character. They then became this character, a single voice with six heads, and answered any and all questions the other groups asked.
Story Nuggets
Participants used the Story Nugget strategy to act out text from The Wild Robot. Story Nuggets refer to phrases or chunks of a text. These are acted out by students as a pre-reading strategy to peak interest and inquiry about the text.
Criteria for Excellence
What makes an excellent performance?
Participants grappled with this question and created their own set of criteria for excellence. Using the criteria they created, they performed Story Arcs from The Wild Robot. This strategy is a way to take Story Nuggets to a more advanced level. They performed sections of text that emphasized the journey of two characters in the story and their friendship. In this way, they are able to enter key ideas in a chapter book and also apply their criteria for excellence to create a strong performance.
Lists: What is amazing in your life?
Participants read the last chapter of the book and made connections to the essential question: what makes an amazing life? Using the handout Roz's Box, they generated a list of what makes their own life amazing.
Reflection and Transfer
The day wrapped up with reflection and discussion of how educators could transfer what they learned into their own context.
Pictures from Day 1
