Teaching n Pink

I have put the finishing touches on my unit and am ready to turn it in. As an elementary educator I am used to writing lessons cross curricula so that was not the difficult part. I have not ever had to take one TEK and try to match it to 3 other content areas (other than the writing process). I chose a TEK that involved media literacy and how it is used, conveyed, etc. I chose Home Ec (do they still have this class), Fine Arts, and Social Studies to make this unit. It was actually pretty easy and I found it fun to try and make the content meaningful to the students. For Home Ec they had to create a menu that conveyed what their recipes were going to be as well as a commercial for their eatery. They also had to come up with a name and a logo. Fine Arts was assigned the task of an ad agency who's client was difficult and wanted an ad for their eatery but only gave the agency a name and menu. Students had to create 3 ads that the eatery could choose from. Social studies was easy as we...

Here's the thing, if you are talking to somebody other than yourself, you have a 100% chance of being misunderstood. When we are speaking to our student's or anyone for that matter, if we are giving instructions, redirecting or sharing information we must consider the audience. Do our best to speak in a language they understand and express our willingness to answer any questions. We have to be approachable, honest and willing to admit that not only are we not right all the time, but sometimes others may hear something different than what we said and meant.   The point is, no one intends on miscommunication, just as our students are not ever going to intentionally NOT follow directions, so the best we can do is be forgiving, encourage students' questions and never assume the responsibility lies with someone else. We can try to communicate in many ways including explanations, visuals, examples, etc. but we still must leave room for error.

I love the idea of the traveling story. I think there are so many variations or takes on it. You could assign a topic or prompt, have students work in whole group or small group or put students in sections like introduction section, body section, and ending. You could also put it in a center and at some point over the week every students has to go and write, it could be continuous where you must just pick up where you left off. I also like the partner write version where partners take turns writing the sentences. I can see where students might get a little frustrated if the story didn't go in the direction they wanted it to or if someone wasn't paying attention and maybe changed the tense or time of day but in a way the story didn't follow. As a side note, while at Toys R Us this weekend in the game section they had what was called story cubes. It was a set of about 9 dice that had different pics on each side. You could roll the dice and write a story for example this i...