Hello? Hi? Is This Thing On?!

Ever find yourself picking up new slang or words when hanging out with a new friend or group of people? It's probably because a lot of our oral communication skills come from listening or modeling after other people. As educators, we must model good oral communication which may include good enunciation, descriptive word choice, proper flow, and geared toward the correct audience. By providing students with a good model at school, they can hopefully transfer those observations to their own practice.

How To Develop Concise Oral Instructions
Depending on how a student comprehends vague instructions, the product they produce could be very different from what you intended. The paper tear challenge we completed in class provided an amazing framework for teaching students how to use proper and concise language. I have embedded a video of this task being done with adults at a conference to remind us. Although this task does provide instructions, they may not be overly clear. Following completing this activity with your students, you can have them help you create more specific instructions. They should make note of potentially providing interactive strategies such as being able to ask questions (OC2.2), making the instructions more clear and coherent (OC2.3), and using more appropriate/descriptive language (OC2.4). After the students help me create a clearer set of instructions, we may retry the activity to see if we achieve more similar results with our "snowflakes" than before! I will most likely be completing a similar activity with my placement class since it is fun and allows students to work with the teacher to create criteria. This could really help with providing a basis for preparing students to help create success criteria as a class for an upcoming assignment.


Would You Trust One of Your Classmates to Guide You Through an Obstacle Course?
I remember in gym class always doing obstacle courses but sometimes being blindfolded and getting directions from my classmates. This may traditionally be seen as a physical activity for gym class, but could very easily be used as a tool to develop listening to understand oral communication skills. This website highlights a lot of different strategies to strengthen communication skills, but I particularly want to focus on the blindfold game. You could easily complete this activity in groups of 3: one student will be blindfolded, one student can give instructions, and the other can be present to provide support through any difficult obstacles. Through this activity, you can look for expectations such as OC1.2 and 1.3. The student listening to the instructions will need to be an active listener so actions are completed in an appropriate time while also listening well in order to comprehend what to in order to overcome the obstacle. You could also look at OC 2.1 and 2.3 for the student actually giving the instructions. This student needs to understand the purpose of giving the instructions is to get the other student through the obstacles safely and in order to do this, they need to be very clear and specific on what they are saying. This sort of activity is also just fun for the kids to complete, it gets them up and moving, and helps them further develop communication and teamwork skills. I have embedded below a similar activity you could do potentially with older students. This game looks at non-verbal communication and teamwork.

Can We Make Predictions Based on Things Other Than Books?
During a lot of literacy lessons involving reading, we are often asked to consider what is going to happen next. This may be done through a writing task, through comprehension, or just through sharing thoughts. But why not consider making inferences and predictions based on videos or audio recordings? We can pause them just like we can stop reading or finish a chapter. This website highlights some strategies to help students learn and practice making inferences about things in literacy whether it be a book, video, or audio source. The main activity I would look at for oral communication is show and infer. This activity basically asks students to use what they know about their classmates to predict what the item is the student brought in. For my placement purpose, I would consider adapting this activity to using some sort of video. I may have students view a part of a video, pause it, and have them discuss what may happen next, or pose a prompt to them to answer. EdPuzzle would be an excellent tool you could use for this in class. This would highlight expectations such as OC1.5, 1.6. Following a few of these pauses throughout the video, I could then have students reflect on what strategies they used to pay attention to the information and how they were able to make concrete predictions. This may satisfy expectations such as OC3.1. Another common practice in classrooms is shared reading. I believe this is a great strategy to strengthen oral communication because it allows for students to work together in a comfortable environment to read aloud to each other and learn new skills. You could further this activity by then having students read a story based on a certain point of view (OC1.8). Having students communicate this way they are still practicing speaking clearly (OC2.1), listening attentively (OC1.2), and potentially interactive practice (OC2.2). Shared reading is something I would like to implement in my own classroom since it provides a great opportunity to assess many aspects of the language arts.

Writing... Do We Have Too?

So many students in my placement seem to DESPISE writing and I'm sure I'm not the only one observing this. How can we as educators get students excited about writing? In my placement, a lot of students struggle with deciding what to write about or feel like they 'suck' at writing. Below I have three different resources that help with generating ideas for writing, fostering writing creativity, allow for clear organization, and group writing activities that can encourage more excitement towards writing. By implementing such strategies hopefully, students will become more engaged, become better with their spelling and sentence structure, and be excited to write. 

Doodling = Fun! Writing = Not So Fun.

After browsing Pinterest for quite some time, I stumbled upon an awesome article discussing a way to help students brainstorm a bunch of potential writing topics. This strategy basically requires students to draw a foot as a starting point, and then they are encouraged to fill the page will doodles and more ideas. In this article, the foot symbolizes the starting point of what the students did that summer, but you could easily alter this in a different direction. This activity can also be made less or more complex depending on grade level. We actually discussed a similar activity in my cohort class where you essentially do the same thing but with a heart instead. An activity could satisfy specific expectations W1.2 and 2.5. By completing what this author calls Sketchnotes, students will be encouraged to generate their own ideas, experiences, and interests as prompts for further writing ideas. Most of the ideas they generate can also be associated with a potential point of view the students may write from. Another resource I was exposed to thanks to our PLC groups, was a Scholastic website that gives students creative prompts for writing specifically for fiction. This website allows users to choose their grade level and then randomly spin to get a full writing prompt with the opportunity to change a section if they wish. Here is an example: Write a short interview with a courageous goblin who is a spy from another kingdom. This gives students the type of writing they should focus on, the main character, and another aspect to the character that they must incorporate. This resource also provides students with help generating ideas (W1.2) as well as encouragement to explore different forms of writing (W2.1). Both of these resources provide students with endless opportunities for creativity as well as many personal writing prompts to use in the future.

Mind Map, Graphic Organizer, Chart. Whatever You Call It, It Helps!

I will never forget how much I used too and still use graphic organizers in various subjects in school. I vividly remember using them frequently for writing. Another article I stumbled upon on Pinterest outlined a variety of organizers you could use for many different things such as creating story maps, facts and opinion charts, and topic webs. I love the word choice chart idea because it allows for students to begin brainstorming what 'juicy' words they can implement into their writing. This specific idea can satisfy the expectation of word choice (W2.3). The summarizing or sequencing charts provide students a framework for sentence fluency (W2.4) as well as preparation for revision (W2.6). Using these charts as a class makes ideas and statements very clear which can be used as drafts or provide a good example for peer revision (W2.7 & 2.8). Graphic organizers are a way less intimidating way to begin your writing. It can be very scary and difficult to look at a blank piece of paper or word document and just start writing. That also isn't a good practice to be teaching our students. I think implementing the option of various graphic organizers to my placement students will really help relieve some of their stress when it comes to starting any sort of writing assignment. Also having all of these strategies displayed throughout the classroom can remind students they exist and that they are welcome to refer to them whenever needed, even if it is not a literacy assignment. Getting students comfortable and familiar with using graphic organizers at a younger age can also foster further organization skills in other aspects of school and subject areas. To see an organizer in action, I have embedded a video below of a class using the five senses organizer to brainstorm before they start writing.

What If We Write Together?!
I never really considered creating a piece of writing to be a very collaborative process with other classmates. Everyone has different ideas and strategies, how can groups work together to effectively create a piece of writing. I was certainly proven wrong in our second lecture on writing. I absolutely loved the collaborative writing activity we did in class (view slides 4-7). Putting my student hat on, I would love to have to expand off someone else's thoughts and create my own section of the story. It is also funny to see how some of the stories turn out at the end of the task. Thinking about my placement, I believe my class would absolutely love this activity. This being said, I actually hope to maybe implement this in my placement at some point. This sort of task could focus on choosing the correct voice, point of view and sentences to fit with the previous persons' thoughts (W2.2, 2.4, & 2.5). This sort of task could be completed following almost any lesson exploring the different forms of writing. It may allow students to explore different examples and get them practicing writing a particular form in a comfortable environment. I have embedded a video below that highlights a similar activity, specifically focusing on sentence structure. As an extension, following completion of this task, I could then ask students to look through the short story for grammar issues, spelling, and punctuation (W3.1, 3.2, 3.4, & 3.5). As a class, we could outline some common mistakes and where to go next in terms of improvement. We could also create a word wall that displays words students are spelling correctly and incorrectly. As an educator, I could also use this activity as a reflection opportunity for the students. They can express their confidence level of writing at this point, what they liked and didn't like about the activity, and where they think they may need to improve (W4.1 & 4.2). Although this sort of activity is meant to be fun, it is important to still be reminding students of good writing practices.