Wednesday, March 10, 2010

ELD and the Smartboard

My ELD class is currently focused around grammar. I am teaching the students about regular nouns, common and proper nouns, singular and plural nouns, action verbs and present and past tense verbs. We have done a variety of activities to help students learn these, but their favorite is the Smartboard! I had been creating many smartboard lessons around the day's objective and then I had a great idea. Why not make the kids create the smartboard lessons???? So that is what I have been doing! (Not everyday, but once every week or two.) One lesson that they created was for a singular and plural noun sort. Each child had to come up with either a singular or plural noun. The students then typed in the word in a smart notebook slide. I had already created a t-chart with singular and plural headings. Then, the entire class got to each choose a noun that wasn't theirs, and put it in the correct column. They loved this! This helped to promote pair/share also because students had to work with a partner to decide if the noun was singular or plural and then "check" to see if the student chosen had put it in the correct column. Every student was engaged and they were very proud of their smartboard lesson!
I am going to try another one today. Each student will come up with a present or past tense verb. The student will then write the verb in a sentence. Each sentence will then be typed into a smartnotbook lesson. Once all sentences are typed, we will come together as a whole class. Students will be required to identify the verb with their partner, and whether it is past or present. I will take turns calling on students to come up to the smartboard and circle the verb and write "past" or "present" next to each sentence. This will give students additional practice with past and present verbs, an opportunity to use and create their own smartboard lesson!

3 comments:

Joseph Miller said...

Cool. I think these students have made it to the level of "create" on the new Bloom's taxonomy.

Kelly Berry said...

Fun, yet engaging and a learning experience! I did something similar this past week with money. Some of my most challenging and low-performing students were the most engaged and excited about their learning.

Elizabeth Hopkins said...

Sara, great idea. Even in 5th grade kids still need to work on parts of speech, so your activity sounds fantastic!