Group items tagged

"With students gone for the day, 6th grade teachers Joy Ford and Ryan Rusk sat in a classroom discussing the Latin root temp. After determining that "contemporary" and "temporary" share the root, which refers to time, the two Woodlawn Elementary teachers then turned to the word "temptation." "I'm tempted to eat this chocolate," said Ford. "That doesn't have to do with time." "But if I'm tempted, I want it now," responded Rusk. "So could it?" Along with a half-dozen other K-6 teachers, the two were participating in a study group in which they meet weekly to learn how to incorporate Greek and Latin roots into their daily instruction. The group was doing a "word sort" activity from the book Greek and Latin Roots: Keys to Vocabulary Building."

"After decades of collaborating to increase child language vocabulary, Betty Hart and Todd Risley spent 2 1/2 years intensely observing the language of 42 families throughout Kansas City. Specifically, they looked at household language use in three different settings: 1) professional families; 2) working class; 3) welfare families. "

"RACE is the acronym we've adopted school-wide to help unify our teaching language and help students develop good answers. The thought is that even kindergarteners can start restating questions verbally and teachers in the youngest grades can use the vocabulary when they are modeling."

"To be college and career ready, students need to be able to read sufficiently complex texts on their own and gather evidence, knowledge, and insight from those texts. These close reading exemplars intend to model how teachers can support their students as they undergo the kind of careful reading the Common Core State Standards require. Each of these exemplars features the following: i) readings tasks in which students are asked to read and reread passages and respond to a series of text dependent questions; 2) vocabulary and syntax tasks which linger over noteworthy or challenging words and phrases; 3) discussion tasks in which students are prompted to use text evidence and refine their thinking; and 4) writing tasks that assess student understanding of the text."