Teaching Vocabulary - Frayer Model

One of the strategies that I learned about through my Teaching American History grant was the Frayer Model. It is a method for teaching students vocabulary. Students start with the definition and then discuss characteristics of that word. Next we discussed examples and non-examples. It might be best to start off a class with a word that is easy for them, but not necessarily related to history. Examples might be: shopping, war, education, and the Internet.

I have now used it twice. The first time was on Monday for helping students understand the word "emancipation" prior to our study of the Emancipation Proclamation. Here is one of the class's results:

The second time I used it was as part of an intervention for students were struggling to understand the concepts of state's rights and federal authority. I walked them through state's rights on one side of the paper and then federal authority on the other side. It worked so well that I am going to use it again and again when we come across important terms that students need to know like tyranny. I think it also would be very helpful to English Language Learners.

History is SPECtacular!

Anthony Fitzpatrick, Implementation Manager for the NJ Department of Education, was a guest speaker at one of the Teaching American History grant sessions in 2012. His book, Social Studies Can Be SPECtacular motivated me to change the way I approach the teaching of a time period. This is a close reading strategy that you can use tomorrow.

On Thursday, the second day of school, I started out by having my students brainstorm everything they knew about Abraham Lincoln. Students wrote down things like 16th President, lawyer, born in a log cabin, tall, beard, top hat, married to Mary Todd, had 4 kids but only one survived to adulthood. I then shared with them this Prezi that I had made and discussed Social, Political, Economic and Cultural characteristics. Finally students were instructed to group each item into one of those categories. It worked really well...except for how do you categorize tall? We skipped that one, but it did provide a nice side lesson about determining important vs unimportant facts.

I am excited to use it throughout the year as students investigate different time periods, set the context for historical documents and much more. I hope that you will try it out in your own classroom!

Strategies for Summarizing

Looking for creative ways to have students summarize a reading or what they learned from a lesson? Try these to make summarizing both more interesting and meaningful.

A-Z Summary: Take post it notes or 3x5 index cards and write a letter of the alphabet in the top left corner. Students must then start the first sentence of their summary with that letter. I usually skip letters hard letters like Q and X or easy letters like T because they could just write "the." By having to think of a way to start the sentence with a certain letter, it forces them to think more about the topic and what they learned. I used this after a class discussion of the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists and it allowed me to make sure the students who were not as vocal still understood the main arguments of each side. It is a great tool to use when you have an extra few minutes in class. It could even be modified in creative ways such as, write the second letter of your last name.

3-2-1: On a post it note, students write 3 things that they learned that day, 2 things they found surprising or interesting and 1 question they still have. This way you can check for understanding and find out what areas need more clarification for students.

# of Words Summary:  Some students often write too little or too much when summarizing. Try requiring students to write a summary that is exactly the number of words you assign, no more and no less. This forces them to decide what is most important. It is best to do this strategy in groups the first time as it can be really tough for students to do if they have not had a lot of experience with how to summarize effectively.