Adjectives, or the most sumptuous and delectable post ever

My daughter, aged six, has an inordinate love for adjectives. I approve. Her favourite adjectives right now are 'adorable' (applied to babies, mostly) and 'sumptuous'. The last one has me a little confused, as I generally use 'delectable' and 'toothsome' for food I like. I think she picked it up at school.

Some of my time at school is spent on adjectives. Just this week, I made the first part of a visual dictionary of optics with my Level 2 Physics class. It contains adjectives such as 'real', 'virtual', 'upright' and 'inverted'. You have no idea how much trouble a simple concept like 'upright' caused. The finished product does not contain the word 'erect', but only because I was particularly vigilant. I now just have to check the rest of the entries and scan them - I wanted to use the computers, but they were all booked. How irritating.

A lot of the explicit vocabulary work I have been doing lately with the Level 1 Science and Y10 Science classes, however, has been concerned with verbs. I have been using a lot of starters that focus on learning outcomes and learning verbs. At Level 1, some of this has been associated with the learning outcomes for the standards on which the students are working (even though we teach according to the curriculum, the students still need to understand the achivement standard specifications from the NZQA). At Y10, a lot of it has been to do with students understanding - and, hopefully, making their own - learning outcomes.

SLO Wordle Activity

Above is the Level 1 document. The number of students who weren't quite sure what verbs were was not quite a huge as I had anticipated. This was encouraging.

Plastics Learning Outcomes Starter Activity

This Y10 starter activity proved a little more difficult. Not many students spotted that the verb was always the first word in the learning outcome. Fortunately, those that did tended to shout it out at the top of their voices, so everyone soon knew.

I don't, in general, print starter activities like this off. I usually put them on the projector and get students to write down what they think they need. We informally assess it by students getting the whiteboard markers and coming to the board to write their answers up. It works for us.

Four computers per classroom

In my ideal world, I would have a class set of laptops. Failing that, having a pod of four computers at the back of the classroom is still pretty awesome.

Four computers is enough that students who finish early can use them to do extension work - like the students in my class today who are playing Fantastic Contraption because they finished their work and did not need to go back and revise earlier work. Four computers is enough - just - that groups can use it for a stations activity, with the other stations being paper-based.

But four computers is not enough when you want students to use online resources to create something new - a presentation or a poster or a video or whatever.

I'm really lucky. The class I tried this with first - Y9 science - is always on at the same time as only one other class. That means I can spread my 24 students around 12 computers across three classrooms. It works - but it's not ideal. When students have a question to ask me or hit a snag, they have to come and find me. It relies on students being able to work unsupervised in empty classrooms - or be trusted not to disrupt the learning in occupied classrooms. I am still not sure of the long-term value of having just four computers in my classroom, but I'm not giving up on making it work yet.

Oh, and since I'm here, here's a link to the wordle that one group made: They are so pleased with themselves.

Java problem solved, wordle made of awesome

So, this is the wordle I made for a vocabulary exercise for a reading on convergent boundaries:



The idea is that they get the wordle and a list of vocabulary questions - not content, not yet - to answer. The questions are ordered from easy to hard, so that more able students can start with a harder question. After answering the questions, the students then go on to using the actual reading to answer content questions.

I'm pretty stoked with this, and think it will work well as a way of supporting vocabulary learning without being a boring list of definitions. I can circulate throughout the class and give support to students who are struggling without the rest of the class being bored.

In case anyone is interested, here are the questions (with the answers in brackets):

1. What are the four biggest words? (plate, earthquakes, mountains, collisions)
2. Put one word into the gap to complete the sentence using these words: Plate collisions _________ earthquakes and mountains (cause or make)
3. Find the word in the wordle that means:
   the part of the plate that collides with another plate (edge or boundary)
   the place where the land meets the sea (coast)
   a really big number (millions)
4. Make three sentence using words from the wordle (plus a, an, and, the, are and other joining words) (eg. When an oceanic plate meets a continental plate to make a convergent boundary, you get a trench in the ocean and a mountain range)
5. Plates come in two types – continental and oceanic. What do these words mean? (about continents and about oceans)
6. Adjectives are describing words, like tiny. Find four adjectives in the wordle. Write a sentence using each one (eg Plate collisions take place over a really huge time)
   

Next time, I want the students to make their own wordles. I just have to find a way for this to happen *makes a considering face*

Key words for e-learning

I'm a huge fan of wordle. There is something so satisfying about seeing keywords visualised in this way. I particularly like this one - I love how the words learning, create and interact dominate the image.