Week Four: Making Connections

Whole Brain Teaching Strategies - what's working:  "Class? Yes?" continues to be the students favorite WBT strategy - they love the funny voices and we often add some gestures - making it a teeny-tiny brain-break work-out session.

      Rule Number Five: Keep your dear teacher happy is now their favorite rule.  When we rehearse this rule, we have facial expressions and gestures and add "...teacher happy, all happy....teacher sad, all sad."  (The great news about this is that we are learning to add and multiply and students need to understand "all" to calculate how-many-in "all").   
      Last week we read Lovely Lunch by Amanda Graham.  A great story with colorful illustrations - at the end of the story the biggest fish emerges to save the smaller fish from the hungry shark, and the smaller fish all dart away in a colorful blur of fish tails and one of my students excitedly pointed to the small fish exiting the picture and cried - "Rule Number One - DO IT QUICKLY!"  So, we had an exhuberant and spontaneous rehearsal of the rules to celebrate making connections to the story.
     

     We have been rehearsing "Mirror" gestures this week.  It has been great fun and the students love to watch and listen then repeat my gestures for vocabulary words.  Their favorite vocabulary word this week was 'tractor'.   When I vibrate my lips, bounce up and down and steer a pretend steering wheel, they think it is hilarious and "Mirror" enthusiastcally.   When I do quick vocabulary check-ups, they all know 'tractor'.
    Biffytoons is also working well.  Students use the gestures when I spot check them on their sight words, and I can actaully see some of  them thinking through the gestures and initial sounds of the words they are learning.   I'd like to spend more time with the slides and gestures.  We practice most days, and almost all the student have mastered the first few sight words.  This is a major accomplishment and has meant that I can start the SuperSpeed 100 program with all the students.  I use the Alphabet and Phonics SuperSpeed program for students who need that, but they still read the sight words posted on the doorway and during our Biffytoons review.

Whole Brain Teaching Strategies - challenges:
      I still have not been able to work out "Teach! Okay", but I'm hoping that our growing confidence with the "Mirror" strategy will lead into "Teach! Okay!"
      I lost myself with Power Pix which is a bit crazy because I know they will work so well.  I was previously sharing classroom wall space and bulletin boards with an Arabic Social Studies teacher, but she now has her own classroom, so I have some more space....and no excuse not to get relevant Power Pix organized, taught, and posted.
      Woops! I also lost "Mighty Oh, Yeah!" and "Mighty Groan" - mostly because
 they got to be a little frequent, raucus, and distracting and I need as few distractions as possible.  I will go back to this strategy and use the "silent party" approach with whisper voices - I think that should curb the distraction, but allow for their continued enthusiasm.