Getting Off to a Good Start – presentation by Carrie Toth

Carrie Toth

A good way to start the year is by folding a little card of A5 and asking kids to write their name on it and a picture of something they like, or something they did on their holiday. Then you can Circle with Balls Ben Slavic Circling with Balls

Or you can start the year with Bryce Hedstrom’s KLB (Special Person) Special Person

Use stories to increase the input. You can tell a story, ask a story or listen to a (familiar) story. Use silly stories! Find a resource that inspires (eg the news story about the 12 soccer boys being trapped in the cave in Thailand), build a story from an image or a story based on the Super 7, a personal experience or on a familiar folktale/story that students would already know (Goldilocks).

Don’t limit  yourself to picture talks! Use pictures from National Geographic, do map talks (cari Sumatra, warnai laut biru – find Sumatra, colour the sea blue) and recipe talks. Use follow-up activities to add input, such as a Round-the-World quiz (students move to different parts of the classroom) where students write their answers in different spots around the room. Or put lots of laminated pictures in the middle of a circle and anyone who wants to picks up a picture and says something about it. (You cannot repeat what has already been said) This is called ‘Circle the Wagon’.

Transition well: give classroom jobs, have students up and moving, emphasise the connection between what you are doing and why, have everything set up and ready to go and vary the types of input you use.

Get grades in the gradebook: use exit tickets (5 quick questions), quick writes, compare/contrast, venn diagram, what’s your opinion/why? (for upper levels, or use emojis)

Use a related video to stretch out your story:  Jurassic Fart,  BHD Cactus Bank. Make predictions, but with younger students give them options eg Is he going to run, or is he going to eat? Continue to use previous structures and add new ones as needed.  Take screenshots of your video. Put all of these up on the Smartboard, or print and laminate all the slides. Use the ‘gutter’ (spaces between the pictures) to make up stuff about the places, characters, etc that are not obvious. Manipulate the students to get them to remember difficult words (this is a Year 5 word so you guys probably won’t be able to remember it). Use 5 main pictures for retelling.

To do this, use Powerpoint. Insert different shapes, then select shape fill, then picture.  Ask your students to retell the story. Share a picture of the slide to their iPads, or ask them to take a photo. Then they tell the story to a face (a stuffed animal face, a picture of someone), then to a friend, then to the teacher.

Assessment of the story could be:

• retell to a partner (record and send to teacher)
• write the story
• write a different story
• write questions to the character, or for a quiz