Pure Manaʻo

Source:  Gonzales, J. (2015, September 3). 5 common teaching practices I'm kicking to the curb. [web log] Retrieved from  http://www.cultofpedagogy.com/ineffective-teaching-methods/ . What is Sacred: Students are sacred. Do no harm, even with good intentions. This article is about some of the things that I will raise my hand to say that, yes, I did that, and I apologize. I meant well. One of the things is popcorn reading, which I stopped doing over ten years ago, but that means I had it in my arsenal for over ten years. Again, I meant well. I am into coaching for fluency and prosody but I needed to give the readings to people ahead of time so they could practice.  I also used popcorn reading so that I could stop and model thinking, but again, there are other ways to model thinking, like my actually reading or again, giving people time to practice.  What I learned and still use from Linda Reif who came to work with us one year, is to create pl...

Saw this on a tweet and decided to try it with our 6th grade Hawaiian studies readings. Check it out. Start here .  You'll get the screen below. I then went to grab some text from the Hawaiian Studies curriculum. This particular one is from the book on Kamehameha V: Lot Kapuāiwa, Introduction Chapter 1, pages 1-3. I put it into the VocabGrabber and here's what I got. A couple things I noticed: The list of 37 words on the bottom left are set up like a wordle, so the ability to bring out themes and important words is already built in. It gives you an example from the text which helps when doing a literary critique because you have possible citations. There are visual connections with the main word as the  piko  or the center (see screenshot below with the word unify) Yes, it does cost money if you want to create a word list or do more with it, but there is a 14-day free trial offer, and on their "educators" page on the menu bar, they give lots of tips o...

Storyline Online is a site Esther Kotke of Hilo Union told me about. The premise is to take powerful picture books and create a video of professional actors reading these books. I listened to To Be a Drum read by James Earl Jones, but I noticed some other favorites like Thank You, Mr. Falker , Knots on a Counting Rope , and Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge . While the actors do the reading, the video shows the illustrated pages and subtitles appear on the bottom so that students can follow along in their own books or read together from the screen. In addition, there are activities and questions for each book. The site is out of funding, so they probably won't add any more books, but they have a nice little collection. This is great for elementary, but since I ' m teaching 9th graders this year, I just thought it's a novelty to pass on, but I chose the right book to compliment what I'm doing right now. To Be a Drum can still be used in my high school class be...