Tips to Keep Your Students Moving

TIPS TO KEEP YOUR STUDENTS MOVING

It’s supposed to be springtime, but somebody forgot to tell Mother Nature. This time of year presents a challenge for teachers of all grade levels. I have taught grades 7-12, but I spent the last twenty years of my career teaching sophomores and seniors.

They are two unique groups for different reasons, and for each level, spring presents special challenges. The name of the season reflects the energy that students have as the days get longer and warmer. They “spring” all around the room and have a difficult time settling anywhere. Sitting still for an hour or longer makes learning tedious and boring for many students.

Although I incorporated movement into my entire curriculum, during the final semester of the year, I made it my mission to develop even more lessons that allowed students to work in groups and to move about the classroom. They were so much more productive that way, and so much better behaved. They needed to talk and to laugh and to enjoy being in class. And I needed that too. After all, I am not immune to the joys of spring.  

I have a few ideas and tips that you might find useful. (You are probably already implementing some of these).

Grouping Tips for Cooperative Learning:

·      * If I wanted my students to form groups, I would have them number off from 1-5. Then each student who was a #1 would meet in one corner of the room, the #2 students would meet in a different corner, and so on. Group #5 would meet in the center of the classroom. We would drag and rearrange the furniture as needed so that everyone would have a seat.

·      * To ensure that new groups formed frequently, the next time we did a new group activity, I would have them number off backwards from five.

·      * I frequently asked my students to work in pairs. Students seated in rows would turn their desks to face one another. This was a quick and efficient way to choose a partner.

·      * Another fun way to group students is to place colored index cards in a container and have students choose a card. Each color forms a separate group.

Get students up on their feet whenever possible.

·   My grammar program involves students working together to complete the group practice assignments. Then, I would call out the answers and we would grade the papers in class.

*  I always called out the answers out loud. Then, students would score the papers. They each had a copy of my grading scale chart in their notebooks. For example: “minus 7 equals 93.”

*  Then I asked the whole class to stand as I called out the grades starting with 50 or below. When the student heard his/her grade, he/she was to sit down. At the end, the students with 99 or 100 were still standing and got a round of applause, but no one was embarrassed at having a low score. The way my Simple Steps to Sentence Sense grammar program is structured, most of the class will have very high scores, and working in pairs gives them an even better opportunity to be successful.

·          *  Sometimes, I had students stretch and walk around the classroom a couple of times before we sat down to do an assignment that required an extended period of deep concentration.

·          *  I asked students to stand and take several deep breaths before they began an extended writing assignment such as an essay or an essay test.

·         * Once in a while, we would have snowball fights while grading papers. (A really strange event since I taught in El Paso, Texas.) Here’s how it worked. After all students were finished with an assignment, they would crumple up their notebook papers and, on my count, they could toss them at each other. When I said “freeze” they would stop, pick up a snowball close to them, and that is the one they would smooth out and grade.

·         * Whenever possible, encourage students to come to the front of the classroom and demonstrate their answers on the board.

·         * Encourage students to teach a concept or a lesson to their classmates. They can teach in pairs or in groups.

·         * Take your students outdoors whenever possible and let them work in small groups.

4.   And don’t forget that teachers also need to move around the classroom, both for the students’ benefit and for their own.

·       * Teach from the back of the room and improve students’ listening skills.

·       * Walk around the room stopping to speak to individual students or to interact with group members.

·       * After students are fully engaged in an assignment, sit down for a short while to take the focus off of yourself, but stand up frequently and move about.

Movement is the key to keeping your students engaged and involved in the lesson you are presenting. Take a look at one of your lessons and see if you can revise it to include movement. 

You will also find lots of no-prep lessons on TeachersPayTeachers.com. Visit the blogs below and find clever examples of ways to keep your students moving in the classroom.

An InLinkz Link-up

How to Avoid Six Common Usage Errors

We all make mistakes, and I am certainly not the Internet Police, but after seeing these bloopers online on social media, I thought these 6 common usage mistakes would make a good topic for a post. Here are just a few of some common errors I recently saw on Facebook and Twitter and a little information on how to avoid them.

************************************************************

“Who remember's this?”

Do not use an apostrophe to make a noun plural.

Correction: Who remembers this?

************************************************************

 "The dog has a microchip in case she would loose her collar."

Loose means not tight.  Lose means to misplace.

Correction: The dog has a microchip in case she would lose her collar.

************************************************************
" I laid down for 5 minutes and woke up 2 hours later."

Laid means to put or to place something.

Correction: I lay down for 5 minutes and woke up 2 hours later.

************************************************************
 “I think that Mom's who watch soap operas are way two dramatic.”

There are two errors in this sentence.

1.  Do not use an apostrophe to make a noun plural.

2.  The word two means the number 2. The word too means to an excessive        degree.

Corrections: I think that moms who watch soap operas are way too dramatic.

************************************************************
 “I was just laying around feeling sick all week.”

The past progressive form of the verb “lie” is was lying. “Laying” means to put or to place.

Correction: I was just lying around feeling sick all week.

************************************************************
“George is a very healthful person.”

Healthy and healthful are adjectives that can be used as synonyms for each other unless one is talking about a person. 

Spinach can be a healthy or a healthful vegetable, but when talking about a person, always use “healthy.”

Correction: George is a very healthy person.

************************************************************
For more practice with apostrophes and verbs, visit my store for some helpful exercises. Some of them are FREE.

This blog post is an updated version of an earlier blog post I wrote.

Thanks for reading,

An Easy Way to Choose Between Who's and Whose

The words who's and whose are often confused and used incorrectly. Learning to use them correctly is pretty simple.

Who's is a contraction for the words who is or who has. The apostrophe is your clue that the word is a contraction. The apostrophe indicates that two words have been combined.

Example: Who's the leader of this group?

                     

Whose is the possessive form of the pronoun who and is used in questions to ask who owns something?

Example: Whose running shoes are on the porch?

An easy trick to always choose the right word is to say both words in the contraction when you read the sentence.

Read this sentence: Who's the leader of this group? as Who is the leader of this group? Because it makes sense to read it as who is, who's is the correct choice.

Read this sentence and choose the correct word:

(Who's, Whose) answers are correct? It would make no sense at all to choose the word who's, because if you read the sentence and included both words in the contraction it would read: Who is answers are correct? That is obviously wrong, wrong, wrong.

The correct choice would be: Whose answers are correct?

Click here for a FREE lesson and 20 question quiz on the use of Who's and Whose.

Visit my store for more helpful products.

*This is an updated post from 2013.

All the best,

Teach Grammar the Easy Way

I hope by now,  if you are using one of my Simple Steps to Sentence Sense books to teach grammar and usage, you have discovered that students can be successful and make good grades and even enjoy learning. As the English Proverb states: "Nothing succeeds like success."

This post is an update on an older post, and many teachers tell me reading it was very helpful. I hope so. 

What a wonderful feeling it is to give students frequent chances to succeed and feel good about themselves! 

The way to achieve this is really simple. When you grade students’ group and individual papers, break each lesson into several components. (I always let them trade and grade except on tests.) 

For example, when you do Step 3: Finding the Subject, don’t just check for the subjects that students find in each sentence. That would only give students 20 answers at 5 points apiece and make it easy for them to get a low score.
Instead, count the prepositional phrase(s) in each sentence as one point, the verb phrase as one point, and the subject as one point. Voila! Now there are over 60 answers and students can miss several and still get a decent score. 

Of course, these tips work with any assignment you give your students whether or not it comes from one of my books. 

For each step, you can decide which parts of the sentence are the key parts. For example, when working on Step 4: Finding the Complements, the key is deciding if the verb is action or linking before looking for the complement. When grading each paper, be sure to count the verb and whether it is an action or a linking verb along with the complement as key elements in the score. 

Use the answer pages in the back of the book to count the number of elements you plan to score in each lesson and make your directions clear about which parts of the sentence students are to mark when scoring papers. This is another opportunity for the teacher to re-teach and emphasize that sentence analysis must be done in steps, and that the steps must be done in order. Skipping a step is a recipe for confusion and disaster. 

This method could get to be a bit too much of a hassle if the teacher had to do the math each time papers are graded and figure out the correct score for papers that have 63 answers, or 71 answers, etc. It could, but it won’t, if you download my Grading Scale Chart. You can print it on both sides of a sheet of paper, slip it into a plastic folder sleeve and take it with you anywhere. You can even give your students a copy if you so desire. 

I always just called out the answers out loud: minus 18 equals ? (or whatever). Then I asked the whole class to raise their hands as I called out the grades starting with 50 or below. When the student heard his/her grade, he/she was to put his/her hand down. At the end, the students with 99 or 100 still had their hands up and got a round of applause, but no one was embarrassed at having a low score. 

Simple Steps to Sentence Sense is an easy and enjoyable way to teach grammar. You can choose to print the exercises and tests and distribute them to your students, or your students can access them in Google Drive and Go Paperless! You will find the books HERE. You know you are successful when you hear students say, “This is fun.” Grammar? Fun? Well, all right! 

Click here for a series of free instructional videos that explain each step in detail.

Please tell your friends and colleagues about my book. (Hint: Simple Steps to Sentence Sense is also a useful tool for foreign language teachers to use, and it is really successful with special education and ESL students.) 

Thanks for reading,

Teach it Your Way!

One of the most exciting things about education these days is that teachers have many choices. Just as our students have individual learning styles, so do teachers have unique teaching styles.

Some teachers prefer to use a projection device and others prefer the white board. Some teachers like to make copies and have students write their answers on the worksheets provided to them. Others make master copies and have the students write their answers on notebook paper.

Some teachers use textbooks and others leave the textbooks in the cabinet and create their own lessons and worksheets.

Now, because of the advances of technology, students can watch instructional videos, listen to audio recordings, or read and record their own answers.

And then there is the most innovative idea of all. Go Paperless. Create your own lessons in Google Drive and use in Google Classroom. Your students will work in the cloud and turn in their work to you via email or however you choose. No more paper shuffling. No more standing by the copy machine when preparing your lessons.

And even more exciting than that is the fact that experienced teachers h

ave created Google Drive Interactive Lessons, and you can buy them on TeachersPayTeachers.com. Just sign in to TpT and search for the hashtag #TpTDigital, or search for Google Drive Digital Resources.

I have 29 Google Drive resources for sale on TeachersPayTeachers.com, and I am working on more. I am pleased to say that my best seller, Simple Steps to Sentence Sense for High School, is now available both in the original print version and as a Google Drive Digital Resource. Take your pick and teach it your way!