Blog Archives

What do teachers do over the summer?

6/20/2013

Besides the obvious recharging and relaxing those first few weeks of summer break, teachers spend time planning for the next school year. I've been working on new items to share with my colleagues and use in my classroom. I'm always trying to find ways to improve my teaching and reach more students. One of my biggest frustration has been students not mastering the same language skills year after year. After teaching second grade for 16 years and moving to fourth grade, I noticed that students struggled to retain skills taught in previous years and even skills taught earlier in the semester.

Most reading/language arts series introduce a new grammar/language skills every 2 weeks with little or no spiral review until the next school year. I was determined to find or create a product that had a built in spiral review of language/grammar skills. This year was my first year to try out a "Weekly Language Review" with my students. I had my first “Ah Hah!” moment when 2 of my students said…. “Subjects and Predicts are easy!”.

Learning a new skill and successfully transferring that knowledge to long term memory requires a great deal of repetition. This product provides many opportunities for review. I used this product daily in my classroom as morning work. I projected the page on the dry erase board and went over the answers with my class – Monday – Thursday. We used the language skill pages from our reading series as well. This took about 30 minutes of our language arts block. The rest of our language arts block was devoted to 6 Traits mini-lessons and writing time. This Weekly Language Review also included many opportunities for students to improve their vocabulary by looking up words in the dictionary or thesaurus. I wrote a grant for electronic dictionaries, so my students would want to look up all the new words they encounter in text and/or to improve their word choice by using the thesaurus button on the same device.

I watched my students gain confidence with their writing and language arts skills week after week. I was also excited to see them become resourceful (looking up words without being prompted) and retaining grammar skills taught from the beginning to end of the school year.

I shared these results with my colleagues. Now I've created a 2nd & 3rd grade version of the Weekly Language Review as well. I've linked both versions below. Next, I'll be working on a 5th grade version.