Planning

It is really hard to believe that next week is spring break and that I am right at a couple of months short of completing my first full year as a Whole Brain Teacher.  It has been an amazing year!  I have learned so much as an WBT intern.  I am so grateful to Nancy, my mentor, and to Coach B. for all of their help and encouragement.  Over the course of this school year I have written about a variety of techniques, skills, and strategies that you would find in a WBT classroom.  For this blog I have decided to answer a question that a lot of people have asked me this year:  Do you find that planning is easier or harder when you are doing Whole Brain Teaching?

The answer to that question is simple.  It is so much easier!  O.k, to be honest, it was harder in the beginning, but that was because everything was so new to me and I had so much to learn.  It took time to figure out how all of the pieces fit together.  Now, I can honestly say that I spend a lot less time planning than I used to.  I think that this is mainly due to the fact that the structures (The five step lesson, Power pics, The Genius Ladder, Teach/Okay, Mirrors, Red/Green Writing, Brainies,  the use of Sentence Frames etc.) are already there.   I just have to plug my lessons into them.  I have found that with so many tools, I can easily weave instruction of a new concept into multiple parts of my day.

A perfect example of this is a unit that we just completed last week.  Our class spent two weeks learning about Point of View and Dialogue.  The first week I focused on point of view.  The five step lesson format made planning very easy.  I began by creating a Power Pic for point of view.  Deciding on my question and answer was very important, because I knew that it was these two things that would guide my instruction.  Below is my Power Pic:

                                                               

Question:  What is point of view?
Answer:  Point of view is who is telling the story:  first person, a character; second or third person, the author.
Gestures:  Shrugging shoulders and then holding up one finger at a time for each of the three persons.

I knew that each day that week I would begin with my question and answer.  When thinking about how to expand my lesson, my first step was to create a sentence frame.  I use sentence frames on a regular basis.  They provide a support and structure for my students, especially my ELL students, as they share during Teach Okays and Call-Outs.  I chose the following frame:  This story is being told from ________________.  I know this because ________________.  When planning any lesson I automatically include opportunities for students to prove their answers using a "because clapper".

This led to the question, "What do I expect my students to use for proof?"  I quickly decided to use the WBT concept of "Power Words".  I created an anchor chart with a tree map.  On the tree map I placed my power words for first second and third person, along with my sentence frame.  Below is a picture of it.  This anchor chart stayed in the front of my room and became a reference for my students during the entire unit.  Below is a picture of it.

                   

Once this was done, the rest was very easy.  The main way that I taught the concept was to read short paragraphs and using Teach/Okay ask the students to share from what point of view the text was being told and how they knew.  I would remind them to use the sentence frames on the anchor chart.  For proof they would say things like, "I know this because I heard the Power Words he, she, and their.  For a couple of days I read the same scenarios, but from different points of view.  Students would use these same sentence frames to discover the point of view that the books they were reading were being written from.  At the end of independent reading time, students would first share with their partners using Teach/Okay and then with the class using Call-outs.

The last step of the five step lesson plan is critical thinking.  This is usually done through writing.  During Red/Green writing I gave my students a short story about a cat named Cupcake who ran away from a campground and walked 150 miles to get back home.  The story was told from third person.  I asked my students to rewrite it from first person, the point of view of Cupcake.  We did some oral writing practice first, and then they began.  The students did a really nice job.  Below is one of their stories.

During this first week, something happened that I was hoping for.  I shared a text with quotation marks.  The character speaking used the word "I'.  Some of my students immediately thought that this had to be first person.  This led to the introduction of quotation marks.  It was a perfect lead-in.  In the past I had always struggled with the best way to teach quotes to second graders, but this year it was easy.  I began with the Quotation Mark Brainie.  My students were familiar with it, because I had previously pointed quotes out to them in text and they had used the Braine, but they really did not understand this Brainie.  I decided that the Brainie would serve in a way as my Power Pic.  This led to me deciding upon the following question and answer:

Question:  What are quotation marks?
Answer:  Quotation marks are talking marks.  They go around the exact words that come out of a character's mouth.
Gesture:  The gesture for the quotation mark Brainie.

Over the course of the week I gave students short stories with lots of quotation marks.  We would do what I called the one minute drill.  They had one minute to underline all of the quotes.  (Of course, I first demonstrated how to do this.)  They then had to read the passage with their partner using their gestures and Brainies, with an emphasis on making sure that the quotes were done properly.  (This had also been modeled numerous times.)  I then asked students to tell their partners (Teach/Okay) the point of view that the story was being told from (Students used the sentence frames on the anchor chart.) and then called on a student to share using a Call-Out.  We then focused on the quotes.  Using High Five Switch, the students had to take turns reading the quotes in order and telling who said it and how they knew.  As they shared, they were expected to use their Brainies, especially quotation marks.  I emphasized the comma and using a capital Brainie for the first word at the beginning of a sentence inside of the quotation marks.  Of course I provide them with the following sentence frame:  ______________ said __________________.  I know this because ___________________.  For their proof they usually said something like, "I know this because it said _______ said after the quotation marks."

As I did with point of view, I asked the students to find quotes in the books that they were reading and to share at the end of independent reading time, using the sentence frames that I had provided.

They were doing so well with all of this, that I decided to take quotation marks to a Genius Ladder and see how well they did at it.  Below is the Genius Ladder that I used.

The students had a really good time with the simple sentence that I chose.  At the Genius level students were asked to write a conversation with themselves and their mom.  Most of my students were correctly using quotes, not forgetting the comma before or after the quote, and were capitalizing the first word inside the quotation marks.  This can be attributed to all of the oral writing that they had been doing with quotation marks.  I was really impressed with how well many of them did at changing paragraphs when they changed speakers.  My students were already very familiar with paragraph form and the indent Brainie, so this wasn't that difficult for them.  You may have noticed that at the extender level I introduced my students to the dependent clause.  This is another Brainie that we had not previously talked about.  Prior to this time, they were not ready for it.  They still needed more work on it.  It will definitely be the focus of our next few Genius Ladders, but they are beginning to catch on.  It just amazes me the caliber of writing that you can get from second graders and what they are actually capable of understanding.  Prior to finding a Whole Brain Teaching I would have never imagined that my students would be writing conversations so effortlessly with quotation marks and in paragraph form, nor would I have believed that they would be able to correctly write complex sentences with dependent clauses.

As a side note I wanted to point out that towards the end of this time we began an explanatory text unit in writing.  Right away one of my students raised her hand and said, "We are going to be writing from second person."  It was one of those moments when all I could do was say a quick prayer in my head, thinking God for Whole Brain Teaching.

I hope that you have found this look into my planning process helpful.  Happy teaching!

The Appositive Brainie and the Genius Ladder

I love the Genius Ladder.  It is absolutely one of my favorite parts of the WBT writing program.  It teaches students parts of speech and sentence structure in an engaging and meaningful way.  There is nothing else quite like it.  If you are unfamiliar with what the Genius Ladder is, please see my post on the Genius Ladder.  In that post I explain all of the levels of the ladder and exactly how to use it in the classroom.

In this post I would like to focus on the Extender Level.  At the Extender Level students are shown how to extend simple sentences.  I personally believe that it is all of the practice that my students have had at this level of the Genius Ladder that has helped them to punctuate their sentences properly.  In previous years a very common writing error made by my students looked something like this:  I was playing ball with my friends.  At the park.  This year I have not seen any errors like this, and I mainly credit the Extender Level of the Genius Ladder for this.  My students now not only understand what it means to extend a sentence, but they know all of the different ways that it can be done, and they get practice with this on a regular basis.  As a result, the majority of the time my students' writing is punctuated properly.  To be honest, it has never been so easy or effortless to get kids to put periods in the proper places in their writing.  (As a side note, let me just say that other components of the WBT writing program play a role in this as well, especially the Brainies.  There is definitely a synergistic effect in WBT writing.  However, it is the Genius Ladder that really helps students understand and apply sentence structure.)

Through January of this year, I had taught my students the following extenders:  because, telling when, telling where, prepositions, a dependent clause starting with if, and the conjunction but.  They were doing quite well with all of these, so I began to think about where I wanted to go next.  Looking through the Brainies I saw that I had not yet taught my students appositives.  Some of you may be thinking that second grade is a little to young to learn appostives, but in reality it is not.  Students come across them all the time when they are reading non-fiction text.  Here is an example of an appositive found in non-fiction text:  Owls, nocturnal animals, sleep during the day and are active at night.  Students do not automatically know how to read the appositive ", nocturnal animals,".  This is something that they must be taught.  Since we were doing informative/explanatory writing and were also reading a lot of informational text in reading, it seemed like the perfect time to introduce students to the Appositive Brainie.  Not only would they learn a new extender, but they would be better able to comprehend non-fiction text, because they would better understand its structure.  Of course, appositives can be found in any type of text, so I knew that learning this Brainie would help my students with any type of reading they were doing.

Although, I wanted to focus on non-fiction text, I decided that it would be easier for my students to understand what appositives were if I began with narrative text.  I began by telling my students that they were going to be learning a new Brainie.  This statement alone was enough to get them excited.  They immediately began trying to guess which Brainie it was.  After telling them that they would be learning the appositive Brainie, I showed them the gesture associated with this Brainie.  I then used the Genius Ladder to introduce it.  The extender level sentence that I used was the following:  My little sister, who is always bugging me, broke my new game.  Since this was the first time that we had looked at an appositive, when we reached the extender level, I spent some time defining it through the use of Mirror Words and Teach Okays.  I told my students that it was like a Post-It note that you put on a sentence.  You don't have to have it.  You can take it away anytime that you want, but it makes your writing more interesting by giving the reader more details.  I then used the sentence at the extender level, but provided the students with additional examples using Mirror Words and Teach Okay.  One of my examples was the following:  My little sister, Sharon, broke my new game.  This example was very important because my lowest students, who could not think of anything else, were able to insert a name.

After a few days of this, I felt like my students were ready to try it with non-fiction text.  We were reading a passage at the time on tree rings, so I put up the Genius Ladder that you see below.  The appositive at the extender level was added with the help of the students.

Students were asked to use an appositive to define tree rings.  I have to be honest.  This was not easy for them.  They worked with a partner to read their passage and come up with a definition.  With some guidance, they did it.  I wanted them to go through this process so that they could see how appositives are used to define vocabulary in non-fiction texts.  We have done similar Ladders with appositives on different non-fiction topics since finishing this first one.  Each one has gotten a little bit easier for them to do.

The real breakthrough came when students began noticing appositives in their reading and pointing them out to me.  I have a few students who have also begun to use them in their writing, which is what I was hoping for.  These students have all received Super Improver Stars, which is motivating the rest of my class to try using them.  

Although this has probably been the hardest Brainie that we have learned so far this year, it has definitely been rewarding and a lot of fun.  I am very thankful for both the Brainies and the Genius Ladder.  They are definitely the rock stars of WBT writing.  I would love to hear how you are using the Genius Ladder and Brainies together in your room.  Please share by leaving a comment.  Happy writing!

Super Speed Reading Games

As an inclusion teacher I have students who enter my room as non-readers or reading significantly below grade level.  Part of the challenge that these students have with reading is the number of repetitions that they need of a word or a phonic's pattern before they "own" that word or pattern. Finding a way to provide students with the needed number of repetitions has always been a challenge, and I had never been able to find that "just right" solution.  That all changed, however, when I discovered Whole Brain Teaching.  In the free downloads section of the Whole Brain Teaching web site, there are two games that were literally a answer to prayer for my low readers. They are Super Speed 100 and Super Speed Rhyme.  In this post I would like to share with you my experiences with these two games.

The first game I would like to talk about is Super Speed 100.  This game is designed to teach beginning readers of any age the 100 most commonly used sight words in the English Language. These are the words that make up approximately 50% of what we read.  The words are arranged in order of frequency.  “The” is the most common word in English, so it is the first word
learned.  “To” is the next most common word in English and is the second word learned, and so on. The game has 100 levels.  One new word is added in each level from 1-100; previously learned words are frequently repeated.  Every 10 levels, there is a Challenge.  The Challenge contains all the
words from previous levels.  In order to continue, students must be able to read all of the words in the Challenge.

I play this game every day during my low students' reading group time.  You can choose to play solo or partner Super Speed.  I have my students play with partners. At the beginning of the year I tested my struggling readers on these 100 words to determine their starting level for the game.  I paired up students who tested close to each other.  Partners are given one minute to alternately read the words.  At the end of one minute they mark where they left off.  I then time them for a second minute, and students try to get farther than they did the first minute.  If they beat their previous number of words, they draw a smiley face in a star on a sheet of stars that come with the game.  When partners are able to read all of the words in a level, I cross that level off, and the next day they start on the next level.  In my room when students fill up one page of stars, they earn a star on the Super Improvers Board.  (For more information on the Super Improvers' Board, see my post on the subject.)  This just provides students with added incentive.  They are always counting to see how many more stars they need to fill up their page of stars.

Immediately following Super Speed 100, we play Super Speed Rhyme.  Super Speed Rhyme is actually a power point designed to teach beginning readers some of the most common word families.  Included in the Power Point are a number of suggestions on how it can be used in the classroom.  One of the suggestions is to play a game using the words from the Power Point.  Last summer, in preparation for the game, I typed all of the words from the Power Point out and grouped them by word families.  Since Super Speed Rhyme was designed with kindergartners and first graders in mind, I added additional word families that I would expect my second graders to know.  The game is played very much like Super Speed 100.  Once again, you have the choice of having your students play solo or with a partner.  For this game I chose to have my students play solo.  They still have a partner, but their partner's job is to follow along and be prepared to provide help reading a word if it is asked for, and correct their partner if he/she reads a word incorrectly.  All partner A's reads first. After one minute they mark where they left off.  They are then given a second minute to try and beat their score.  If they do, they give themselves a smiley face and I cross off one line of words on their paper.  This process is then repeated with all of the partner B's.  I have attached the word list that I use with my students.  Please feel free to use it as is, or revise it to match the levels of your students.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kgav55nrzbcwj3f/speed%20rhyme%20words.docx?dl=0

I have seen so much growth in my struggling readers, and I truly believe that these two games have played a big part in this growth.  I think that they are successful for two reasons.  The first is student engagement.  I have never seen kids so excited about coming to a reading group, and I have never seen struggling readers have so much fun reading.  The kids love the game format, and they love to see their daily improvements.  The second reason is the number of repetitions that these games provide.  The repetitions are built into the format of the game.  My lowest student played the game for over two weeks, before he could remember the first ten sight words.  Since then he has progressed more quickly, since only one new word is added at each level.

When students graduate from Super Speed 100, there is another game that I would highly recommend called Super Speed 1,000.  This game is appropriate for all students who can read the first 100 sight words.  My kids love it!  It can also be found on the Whole Brain Teaching web site under free downloads.

No matter what grade level you teach, if you have struggling readers in your classroom, I promise you that you will find success with these games.  I hope that you will give them a try.

Thirty Seconds or Less

Thirty seconds or less would be a great model for Whole Brain Teachers.  This is because thirty seconds is the longest amount of time that a teacher should talk at once before engaging students, preferably with Mirrors and/or Teach Okay.  Sound impossible?  It's not!  Yes, it does take some practice.  You really have to be aware of how long you are talking.  You also have to learn how to chunk your lessons.  I decided to write this post because many teachers have asked me how I chunk my lessons.  The question I keep getting is, "How is it possible to talk for only 30 seconds at a time and still communicate everything that you need to."  In this post I would like to give you an example of how it is done.

To demonstrate how this is done I chose a lesson that I did recently with my students.  It was on the second grade standard "Author's Purpose".  I will be sharing the first day of the unit.  Since the purpose of this post is to show the ratio of talk between myself and the students, all of my dialogue will be in black.  My students' participation/dialogue will be in green.  I will not be including "hands and eyes", "Class Yes", or where I used gestures,  You can find information about these things in other posts.  Here, I would like you to focus specifically on how the lesson is chunked.

We know that authors write book, but I have a question for you.  Why do you think that authors choose to write books.  Tell your partner in a complete sentence and be sure to use a because clapper.

Using Teach Okay students talk with their partners and create sentences that answer my question.  One example of a sentence I heard was, "Authors write books because they want us to learn something and get smarter."  Three students shared their answers using call outs.

Mirror Words.  Mirror Words.  What is Author's Purpose? What is Author's Purpose?  (repeat sequence twice) Teach.

Okay,  What is Author's Purpose?  What is Author's Purpose.

Mirror Words.  Mirror Words.  Author's Purpose is why the author wrote the text:   to persuade, inform, or entertain.

Author's Purpose is why the author wrote the text:  to persuade, inform, or entertain.  (repeat sequence three times)  Teach.  Okay.  Students tell their partners the definition approximately three times.

Take a look at out Power Pic.  There is a picture of a pie on it.  The pie is to remind us of the three purposes.  The first letter in pie, the "p", stands for persuade.  The second letter, the "i", stands for inform.  The third letter, the "e", stands for entertain.  Explain to your partner why there is a picture of a pie on our power pic.

Using Teach Okay students take turns explaining to their partners why there is a pie on the power pic.

Today we are going to focus on persuade.  Mirror Words.  What does persuade mean.  What does persuade mean?  (repeat twice)  Teach.  Okay.  Students repeat the question two times.

Mirror Words.  Mirror Words.  The author is trying to convince us to think like him because he wants us to do something.    The author is trying to convince us to think like him because he wants us to do something.  (repeat sequence three times)  Teach.  Okay.  Students tell their partners the definition approximately three times.

Commercials are good examples of what it means to persuade.  Companies make commercials because they want to persuade us to buy their products.  I am going to show you a commercial.  As you are watching, I want you to think about what the company wants us to do and how you know it.  Tell your partner what I want you to do.

Using Teach Okay the students paraphrase the directions that I just gave them.

Students watch a 30 second commercial about Doritos.

I would like you to tell your partner what the company wants you to do.  

Using Teach Okay students share what the company wants them to do.  An example of a sentence I heard is "The company wants us to buy Doritos.  One student shared using a call out.

I would now like you to tell me how you know this.  What did you see in the commercial that made you know that the company wanted you to buy Doritos.  Please use the following sentence frame:  I know this because ______________________.

Using Teach Okay students fill in the sentence frame.  I then asked a couple of students to share using call outs.  Here is what one student shared:  I know this because the commercial said that they tasted good.

I am now going to read a letter to you.  I would like you to listen very carefully and think about who is doing the persuading.  Who are they trying to persuade, and what do they want to persuade them to do.  I also want you to think about how you know this.  You will be using the sentence frames on the board:  ______________ wants _____________ to _________________.  I know this because ______________.  Tell your partner what I would like you to do.

Using Teach Okay students paraphrase the directions that the teacher gave.

Teacher reads the letter.
using Teach Okay students orally fill in the sentence frames on the board.  I then asked a couple of students to share using call outs.  

The above process was repeated with two other letters.

This was the end of the expand part of my lesson.  Immediately following this was QT (step four of the five step lesson plan).  Critical thinking (step five) occurred later in the week after we had spent time on inform and entertain.

I hope that you found this example helpful.  Remember, it is all about practice.  When you first start, don't try to chunk everything that you teach.  This will be too overwhelming.  Instead, choose one lesson and plan where your Teach Okays are going to go.  Make it a goal to not talk more than 30 seconds.  Once you are comfortable with the lesson format, you will find that you are using it more and more.  Before you know it, you will find that you are teaching this way for the whole day.  Happy chunking!

The Perfect Fit Methodology

When someone asks me what Whole Brain Teaching is, one of the first things that I tell them is that Whole Brain Teaching is not a program, it is instead a methodology.  This is a very important distinction.  We have enough programs in education.  Programs demand a chunk of our precious teaching time, they tell us what to do, and they often tell us exactly how to do it by scripting out everything that we are to say.  In a nutshell, it is prescribed content.  A methodology, however, is not content.  It is the vehicle we use to deliver the content.  It is the collection of strategies and techniques we use to ensure that our students are learning the content.  A methodology is not something else that we have to do.  It is a better way of doing what we already have to do.  This, in a nutshell, is Whole Brain Teaching:  a better way of doing what we already have to do.

One of the reasons that I fell in love with Whole Brain Teaching is because it wasn't one more thing I had to do.  The strategies and techniques were so easy to implement and use that everything I was already doing became so much easier and so much more successful.  I could give you numerous examples of this, but in this post I would like to share with you the difference that Whole Brain Teaching made in my favorite contraction lesson.  When I was student teaching one of the cooperating teachers at the school I was at shared with me a lesson that she used to teach contractions to her students.  I fell in love with it and have been using it ever since.  It is called "Magic Door Contractions".  Below is a picture of a Magic Door".

In the past I always taught this lesson by telling students that I was going to do a magic trick for them.  I would then hold up the door with both flaps shut.  Making a big production out of it, I would tell my students that I was going to take two plain ordinary words, did and not, and by saying the magic words, "AbraCadabra Contraction Action," I would turn these two plain ordinary words into a contraction.  I would then open the doors with a flair and reveal the contraction did not.  I then would explain that magicians all have a secret to their tricks that only the magician knows.  I would ask my students if they wanted to become magicians and be able to do the magic door trick - which of course they all did.  What followed was my ten minute lecture on how to form a contraction.  Of course, I was very dramatic as I explained how I would say the contraction that the two words made; listen for the missing letters; and then squeeze the two words together, replacing the missing letters with an apostrophe.  What I did not realize was that I was talking far too long, and that no matter how dramatic I was being, most of my students had tuned me out after a couple of minutes.  I would always end the lesson by giving the students blank doors that they had to fill in with the two words and contraction of their choice.  They would try the trick one time with a partner, and then they would take their doors home to do the trick with their families.  I had always felt like this was a good way to introduce students to what contractions are.  It was fun and hands-on.  Students got a good introduction to contractions, which I built upon over a two week period in which I gave students many days of practicing how to make contractions.

This year I still wanted to use my Magic Doors, but I wanted to present them to my students using the Whole Brain Teaching vehicle of choice:  The Five Step Lesson Plan.  In this post I will not be defining common WBT terms used during a five step lesson such as "Mirror" and "Teach Okay".  If you are not familiar with the specifics of a five step lesson, please see my separate posts on this topic which will define these terms and take you more in-depth.  For the purposes of this post, I simply want to demonstrate how I was able to take a lesson that I have already done, and teach it the WBT way.  Below is what it looked like the WBT way:

* Please note that this lesson took place over a three day period.

Question:  (MW)  What is a contraction?  (T/O)

Answer:  (MW)  A contraction is a word with missing letters marked by an apostrophe, zeep.  (Zeep is the sound effect that accompanies the apostrophe, which is one of the Brainies.)  (T/O)

Explain:  I did my magic trick, and then I asked the students to explain the trick to their partners (T/O)
I then reminded my students that the apostrophe took the place of the missing letters.  So I asked them which letters were missing in the contraction didn't.  They had to tell there partners which letters were missing and how they knew, using a because clapper.  (T/0 followed by Call-Outs)
(MW)  Contractions come in families.  (T/0)  I then displayed a poster of contraction families and asked my students to determine how many contraction families there are.  (T/O followed by holding up fingers to show the answer)  Below is a picture of the poster I displayed:

I then went under my sign for Big Point.  Students who chose to become model mirrors stood.  (MW)  Every family has the same missing letters.  (T/O)  I then made a big deal out of the fact that if you can learn which letters are missing in each family, then you can make any contraction.  I also reminded them that they already knew the missing letter in the "not" family, so that meant they only had eight more to learn.
We then looked at one family at a time and using T/O followed by call-outs, students had to tell me the missing letters in each family.  They also had to prove which letters were missing using a because clapper.  Before we moved on to a new family, I would give students a list of the words that made up the contractions in that family and they had to tell their partner the contraction for those two words in a complete sentence and write the contraction on their air whiteboard.  (One of the Brain Toys).  We used High Five Switch for this.  Below are the sentence frames that the students used when sharing:

___________ is the contraction for __________ and ______________.  You write the contraction _____________ (Spell it on your air whiteboards.)

After all of this, I told them that it was now their turn to do the magic trick.  We went through the same process we did at the beginning of the lesson with me doing a trick and the students explaining the trick to their partners using T/O.  I then passed out doors already made.  (This was a switch from what I had done in the past when the students made the doors, but I felt that this way they would have the opportunity to do more tricks.)  Using Uh/Oh Switch students did the trick for their partner.  Students then traded doors and did the trick with their new door, once again using Uh/Oh Switch.  We continued doing this until students had had the opportunity to perform the trick several times.  When done I allowed all of the students to take one door home so that they could perform this trick with their parents.

Test:  I used QT and made statements such as:  In the not family, the missing letter is the "o".

Critical Thinking:  Students had to write a paragraph that answered the question, "What is a contraction?"  They were encouraged to use the "For Example Popper".  (This is another one of the Brain Toys.)

*I was also giving out Super Improver Stars all week to students who had begun to use contractions in their writing.

Following this lesson, students had an additional one day of practice making and writing contractions before they were tested.

How did the WBT way compare to what I used to do?  In past years I spent two weeks on contractions and spent a lot of time working with students in small groups to make sure they understood what a contraction was and how to write one.  It was a lot of work.  When test day came I would get a few hundreds from my high students, and the rest of my class would mostly get B's.  Generally I would get a few C's, as well as a couple of D's or F's, usually from my special education students.  I would then go back and meet with the students in small groups or individually to discuss what they had trouble with on the test.  It was an exhausting process.

This year I spent one week on contractions.  I spent no time working with students in small groups prior to the test.  Sixteen out of seventeen students got an "A", including my two lowest.  One student got an "F".  I only had one student to go over the test with, and the entire week of teaching contractions was fun and easy!

If you have not yet tried Whole Brain Teaching, my question to you is "What are you waiting for?"  It is not more work.  It is a methodology that is fun, easy, and a perfect fit for anything that you are already doing.

Practice Cards

Over the course of this school year I have had many teachers come to me in frustration because they had some challenging students in their classrooms and the basic scoreboard was not working for those students.  This is when I would introduce them to Practice Cards.  Practice Cards are considered to be level two of the Scoreboard Game and are designed to help you reach those students that Coach B. has named our "Beloved Rascals".  They are the kids who need a little extra motivation to follow the classroom rules.  In this post I would like to share with you what the practice cards are and how to implement them in your own classroom.

You will need to do a little bit of advance preparation in order to get started with practice cards.  The first thing you will need is a pocket chart similar to the ones teachers use for red/green cards.  However, you will be using yours for the practice cards.  Assign each student a pocket.  You will then need to run off, and I would suggest laminate, your practice cards.  (I will explain exactly what these cards are in just a moment.)  The good news is that the cards are already made for you.  You can find them under free downloads on the Whole Brain Teaching website,  The address is www.wholebrainteaching.com.  Just remember that you need to register on the site in order to have access to the free downloads.  You will also need a letter to send home to parents letting them know which rule their children have broken.  Finally, you will need a letter explaining this management system to the parents.

Now let's look at how practice cards work.  A practice card is a small card with one of the five classroom rules on it.  The rules are as follows:

1.  Follow directions quickly.

2.  Raise your hand for permission to speak.

3.  Raise your hand for permission to leave your seat.

4.  Make smart choices.

5.  Keep your dear teacher happy.

If a child is having difficulty follow a particular rule, the teacher places the practice card for that particular rule in the child's pocket on the pocket chart.  The child then must come in at recess for rule practice.  This is not intended to be a punishment for the child and should not be presented as if it is.  Instead, it is an opportunity for the child to practice the rule that he is having difficulty with so that he will remember to follow it in the future.  To practice the rule the child simply repeats the rule with its corresponding gesture over and over for a specific length of time.  Here, however, is the great part about this.  You let the child decide how long he thinks that he needs to practice the rule in order to remember it and be able to follow it.  It could be as short as one minute or as long as four minutes.  It is not about how long the child practices the rule.  It is about communicating the importance of following the rules and letting the child know that you are there to help him/her be successful in this.

The child is also given a note to take home to his parents letting them know the rule that he needs practice following and asking them to have the child practice the rule at home.  The note must be signed and returned the next day.  The practice card can then be taken out of the child's pocket.  Sometimes you will have a situation in which letters are never returned.  When this happens, you can ask another staff member to do rule practice with the student and sign the letter.

Since the goal is not to punish but to help students follow the rules, practice cards can be covered with purple cards, which means that the student does not have to come in for rule practice.  Here is how the purple cards work.  Let's say that you have a student that began the day blurting out.  He was not following rule two, so you put a rule two practice card in his pocket.  After he got that card, you could see that the child was working really hard at following rule two and did not blurt out the rest of the morning.  You could then choose to cover his practice card with a purple card.  This shows the student that you recognize and appreciate the effort he is making at following rule two; therefore, he no longer needs to come in for rule practice and will not need to take a note home.

If you have a child who consistently is breaking a rule, even after coming in for rule practice and sending letters home, it is time to give that child a star card.  I just take a note card and write the rule that the child is having trouble following in the center of the card.  I then ask the child to make a tally mark every time that he is following the rule.  When the child has demonstrated that he can follow the rule, he earns a Super Improver Star. (See my post on the Super Improver Wall.)  It is not about the number of tallies that a child makes on his card.  It is about using positive reinforcement to help a child change a behavior.

Practice Cards should not be started on day one of school.  Students need time to learn and understand the rules first.  At the beginning of the year when I student is having trouble following a rule I keep him in for a talk about the rule he broke and what he can do that would help him follow that rule.  I usually ask if the student would like a short talk, long talk, or no talk.  If they choose no talk they must tell me the rule that they broke and what they will do in the future to make better choices.  In a short talk I share this information with them.  I have not yet had a student choose a long talk, but I always leave it as an option.

Some teachers try not to start practice cards until the end of October or even Thanksgiving.  However, if you have a very challenging class, you might find that you need to start them sooner.  I have been very blessed this year.  For the first time ever, I do not have any real challenging kids; therefore, I have not had to implement practice cards.  I do, however, have them ready for when the need arises.  What I love about using the Whole Brain Teaching management system is that you have all of the tools that you need to work with challenging students, but you only pull them out when you need them.  Every class is different, so each year the tools that you use will be different as well.

For those of you who feel like the practice cards would benefit your students, I am sharing with  you the letter that I had created to send home for when I do decide that practice cards are necessary.  Please feel free to use it with your students

.https://www.dropbox.com/s/3pkdnnkctortbvu/Parent%20Letter%5B1%5D.doc?dl=0

Please note that there are additional strategies beyond the practice cards that you can use with your most challenging "beloved rascals".  You can find these techniques on the Whole Brain Teaching web site on the drop down menu under levels.  I would also encourage you to watch Coach B.'s webcasr called "Reforming Challenging Kids".  It can be found in the video library.  Go to  Goodies on the drop down menu and click on WBT tv.

I hope that the information that I shared with you will help you in working with your "Beloved Rascals".

Getting Started in Whole Brain Teaching

I like Whole Brain Teaching and would like to use it in my classroom, but it is so overwhelming.  How do I get started?

I have heard these or very similar words many times over the last few months.  I do not think there is one right answer, because each of us have our own learning styles and learning curves.  What I would like to do in this blog post is share with you what I did, in hopes that it will help and inspire you.

I found Whole Brain Teaching by accident.  I was bored one night, sitting at the computer, and decided to google "second grade best teaching practices".  Up popped something called Whole Brain Teaching.  Out of curiosity I clicked on it.  The website itself intrigued me.  I wasn't sure where to go first, but then I noticed a tab on the dropdown menu labeled first steps.  This seemed like a good place to begin, so I clicked on it.  I then began to read each item under first steps.  I have to admit that I was very confused at first.  It was almost like reading a foreign language.  At the same time, however, I found it fascinating.  I had never heard of anything like it.  At that time there was slightly over a month left in the school year, and I decided to give it a try.  My thinking was that if it worked and I liked it, I would be ready to go at the beginning of the next school year.  If I didn't, no harm in trying.

So, that night I typed up the rules (At the time I didn't know about all of the free downloads) and took very careful notes.  The next day I came to school armed with both.  The first order of business was to rearrange my desks so that all of my students had a partner.  Then, I drew a T-chart on the board for my scoreboard, hung my rules on the board, and when my students came in explained to them that we were going to try something new.  Then, the best way that I knew how, I explained to my students the five rules, Class Yes, Hands Eyes, and the Scoreboard.  A little later in the day I taught my students Teach Okay and Mirrors.  To be honest, Mirrors confused me the most.  I was not clear on exactly how Mirrors worked.  So that night I went home and googled "Whole Brain Teaching Mirrors".  That was when I discovered the Whole Brain Teaching You Tube channel and all of the wonderful examples of Mirrors and Teach Okay.  Armed with that new information I went back to school the next day ready to show my kids how it was done.

I have to stop for a moment and say that one of the main reasons that I was immediately so hooked on Whole Brain Teaching was the response of my students.  They loved everything that we were doing.  One of the first things that I noticed was that student engagement immediately went up.  I always ran a tight ship in my classroom, but I was amazed at how effortless it now was to get and hold their attention.  It was obvious how much fun they were having, and I was right there with them.

Anyway, this pattern continued for about a week.  Each night I would go home and watch videos.  I also discovered that there were lots of blogs out there, and I devoured them.  The one that I learned the most from was Nancy Stoltenberg's.  I never imagined that a few short months later I would be in the intern program and she would be my mentor.  God works in mysterious ways.  Every morning I would come back to school and share with the kids what I had learned that we were going to try.  I remember watching a first grade video in which the teacher called her partners Peanut Butter and Jelly.  Up until then I had just been using "A" and "B".  I loved her idea, however, and the next day my partners became Peanut Butters and Jellies.  If I forgot and called them "A's" and "B's", the students were quick to remind me.

While I was watching videos, I also discovered that you could register on the Whole Brain Teaching site and receive free downloads.  The only requirement was to tell ten people about Whole Brain Teaching.  I had already done that, so, as the site asked me to do, I sent a quick e-mail to Chris Biffle (The founder of WBT) letting him know that I had shared with ten others and thanking him for all of his hard work in making the resources available.  I then entered the world of teacher heaven.  I could not believe all that was available.  I had no idea what each download was, so I just began downloading titles that sounded interesting to me.  I would learn about something new and bring it back to school with me the next day.  It almost became like a game with my students:  "What is Miss Ray going to show us today?"  I was spending hours on this every night, but it was so much fun that it did not seem like work.

By this time I was totally hooked on Whole Brain Teaching and new that I would never teach another way.  It is hard to pinpoint one reason that I felt this way, but two things do stand out to me:  First, rule two stopped all blurting in my classroom.  I had a couple of students who blurted out all of the time.  This had been going on all year, and it was very frustrating.  However, by just saying "Rule Two" and having the kids say the rule, the blurting stopped within a couple of days.  It was like watching magic happen before my very eyes.  Then there was the change in my students' writing.  The writing downloads were some of the first that I looked out, because I was the most curious about them.  I fell in love with the Brainies, oral writing, Red/Green Writing, The Triple Whammy Sentence, and the Genius Ladder.  Those were all things that I had implemented by the second week, and the results were astounding.  In a way it is embarrassing to admit, because I always thought of myself as a very strong writing teacher, but I have to tell you that I saw more growth in one month in my students' writing than I had seen the entire school year.  It was incredible!

Other downloads that I loved and also immediately implemented were Electronic Super Speed Grammar, Super Speed 1,000, and Super Speed math.  I also learned from the downloads how to teach using the Five Step Lesson Plan and began building my lessons around that plan.  If I wanted to know more about a topic, I would scroll through the Webcasts until I found what I wanted, and I would listen to it and take notes.  Within a couple of weeks I had filled a new legal notepad with all of my notes. 

 At this point there was no real order to what I was trying out.  My goal was to implement as much of Whole Brain Teaching as I could before school ended, so that I would be ready for full implementation the next year.  I have to be honest.  It was a little crazy.  I was just so in love with WBT, that I was like a woman possessed.  In all my years of teaching I had never experienced anything like it, and I just couldn't get enough of it.  One evening I came across an explanation of Prove It on one of the blogs that I was reading, and I decided that I had to try it immediately.  My lesson plans the next day called for testing practice, because we were about a week away from end of the year testing, and I really wanted to try it the WBT way.  The next morning I was up at 5:00 watching Coach B's webcast on Prove It.  I took notes and that same morning I was teaching my kids how to play. 

I was so determined to try everything out before school ended, that I had my kids doing paper clip editing on the last day of school  I didn't intend for this to happen, but I had just read about it a couple of days prior, and I really wanted to try it out.  My kids didn't mind.  They thought it was a lot of fun.  That is what makes WBT so engaging for our students.  It is that golden thread of "funtricity" that is woven into all that we do.

By the last day of school I had pretty much tried out everything except for three star homework, Mind Soccer,  and the Super Improvers Wall.  By the time I had learned about these things, their were only a couple of weeks left in the year, so it was to late to implement them.  There were also a few other things that I didn't get to, like Puzzlers and Complexors (components of the writing game) and Brain Toys.  I was on overload and finally decided that some things would have to wait until the next year.

That summer I got a copy of Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids and began reading.  I also made it a point to watch all of the webcasts that I had not already seen and read anything on line that I had not already read.  By the end of the summer I had filled another notepad with information.  I do not think I had ever been so excited for a school year to begin.  I couldn't wait to see what it would be like to start Whole Brain Teaching with a class from day one of school.  Let me just say that I have not been disappointed this year.  WBT has far surpassed my expectations.

I have since been told that the way I implemented WBT in my classroom is not the norm.  Most people probably take it a little slower than I did, but for me it worked.  You will need to find what works for you.  Take it at your own pace, but don't stop implementing WBT strategies and techniques.  There are so many great WBT gems out there.  You don't want to miss one because you stopped digging.