Notes from the Ridge

Activities for middle school…let’s see what I can find

Originsonline.com includes information on responsive design for middle school. Here is a link to their articles page. Not all are specific to beginning of the year, but some will certainly help. In particular Establishing the Circle of Power and Respect.
http://www.originsonline.org/rd_articles.php

Here is something pretty fabulous (works best with IE though…so that may be questionnable
It is a slide show that 5th grade teacher Beth Sommers shows to her class at the beginning of the year.
http://teachers.net/wong/MAY07/beth_sommers_procedures_files/frame.htm

Another slide presentation for the first few days of school
http://teachers.net/wong/FEB05/ChelonndaDCPresentation2_1_files/frame.htm
Here is an article from Harry and Rosemary Wong’s Effective Teaching section on teacher.net called First Day of School Script—in Spanish, Too!
http://teachers.net/wong/AUG07/

I do a lot of learning assessments – learning style inventories, interest questionnaires…etc…Basically I spend the beginning of the year gathering data about my students to help me design their learning situations throughout the rest of the year. Last year I visited a classroom in Burlington where the teacher had her students take multiple intelligence assessments and then had them graph their results using postits. The graphs were kept on the classroom wall as a reminder of the diverse intelligences in the classroom.

I’ll keep thinking on this one and look for specific lesson plans…

Great idea to create a repository of some sort!

   Tracy 07.31.07 @ 2:57 pm