MiddleWeb's New Resources (431)

From our newsletter • A festival of teaching tips • Stenhouse: Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing? • Let students create their questions • Math all over the place • Blowing up a storm • Not enough time to assess? • Reading to remember • It's the Witching season • Our new Quick Links (free subscription)

20 Tips - about Everything

Creating blog posts and articles around "numbered bullets" is all the craze. Three tips, 5 ideas, 6 steps, 4 never-do's. Hey, we're guilty. So we took some guilty pleasure in wallowing in Edutopia's totally over-the-top approach to Tips Chic: a slew of articles celebrating the site's 20th anniversary, all featuring (yep) a Top 20. We'd give the prize to "20 of My Biggest Teaching Blunders," but "20 Things I Never Thought I'd Say in an Elementary Classroom" is also a hoot. On the practical side, we favor "20 Tips for Managing Project-Based Learning" and the piece by our middle grades teacher friend Heather Wolpert-Gawron: "20 Everyday Ways to Model Technology Use for Students."

 

From Stenhouse Publishers

Use technology to reenergize your writing instruction with "Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?" Practical lessons help you advance from simple word processing and publishing tools to digital storytelling, distance learning, interactive editing, and revamped rubrics—while meeting writing standards. Preview the entire book.

 

Students Asking Their Own Questions

There's a useful instructional article in the Harvard Education Letter, describing a six-step process for teaching students to create their own questions about what they're learning. Question formulation creates student buy-in and deepens learning, say the authors, who offer examples from very different middle grades classrooms. “When you ask the question," says an inner-city student, "you feel like it’s your job to get the answer, and you want to figure it out.”

Math All Over the Place

“Does putting math in context mean that we cannot teach math in abstract?” Blogging for MindShift, Audrey Watters responds to a NYT op-ed calling for applied math and references a TED Talk by math teacher Dan Meyers. For a look at what’s happening in math ed today, visit NCTM’s monthly Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School and look for public articles. September’s non-member download tackles estimating to improve fraction calculations (click download-upper right). Find engaging activities and review materials (complete with video how-to’s) at After School Math. Abstract or applied, you'll find plenty to peruse.

Blowing Up a Storm

Recently Vermont Public Radio broadcast news about a tiny village coping with the devastation brought by Hurricane Irene. With storms brewing in the Atlantic and more possible into November, we are recommending several sites to bring the hurricane season to life for your students. For a storm-by-storm review of 2011, try Weather.com’s State of the Season. Thinkfinity provides a whole page of K-12 sites from the likes of NASA and AAAS. For instantly useable resources, visit Scholastic. Among its links is one for kids who are wondering what hurricanes are like in the Pacific. For a teaching perspective, see sixth grade teacher Marsha Ratzel's ideas for engaging students with violent weather.

Assessment: Show Me the Time!

Formative assessment works. Sixth grade E/LA teacher and popular blogger Bill Ferriter has Robert Marzano's numbers to prove it. But after four weeks of struggle, Ferriter wonders if ongoing assessment of teaching and learning is really possible for teachers who have an imperative to cover the curriculum, and other school and home responsibilities to fufill. Read his suggestions for altering school life to make the oft-touted assessment strategy a reality (some are dependent on funding). And browse all the commiseration and recommendations submitted by readers.

Reading to Remember

ASCD Edge blogger Rhoda Koenig provides strategies for helping students in the intermediate grades remember what they have read. It's an excerpt from her book, Learning for Keeps: Teaching the Strategies Essential for Creating Independent Learners. Koenig follows the efforts of fourth grade teacher Ann Daley who introduces “chunks, blocks and breakthroughs” to help kids analyze their reading. See how Daley uses differentiated group practice to build toward individual understanding.

It's the Witching Season

Witches have a place in Halloween — and in American History. It was on September 22, 1692 that the Salem Witch Trials led to the execution of the final eight victims. This UM-Kansas City site, filled with transcripts, images and maps, includes an opportunity for students to decide how they would have responded to being accused of witchcraft. Also suggested by Awesome Stories are video clips from “In Search of History” which review the deadly hysteria and describe Puritan beliefs and the second-class status of Puritan women. The introductory clip on European torture of accused witches may be too vivid. For a lighter take on witches and Halloween, visit ReadWriteThink’s collection of lessons and activities and the resources at the American Memory site, including a "real" ghost story.

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MiddleWeb's Quick Links

Didn't find quite what you need? Here's a new feature we'll include in all future newsletters. 100 characters or less.

• YouTube launches Teacher Channel. School-friendly features coming soon.
• ClassDogo, a new mobile app, aims to help teachers track and manage classroom behavior.
• Online imaging tools make student multimedia projects more fun, less frustrating.
• Earth Science Week ahead. Lots of activities for the Oct. 9-15 event.
• Who cheats in school and what can we do about it? Surprising infographic.