Partner Connection, November 20, 2007
Alex shares her prediction strategies she uses
with her students to understand what
information can be found under certain topics.
The final field advisory for the Fall 2007 semester was held on November 13, 2007. UIC students and CPS partners participated with avid interest and talked about the classroom literacy artifacts brought in by CPS partners and educational issues raised by UIC students.
Jennifer brought in "Goodbye Math" coupons to demonstrate how she teaches her students the concept of exchanging these coupons for groceries. She highlighted how this is critical for her students so they can supplement their limited incomes. During the discussion she also mentioned how the students do "picture shopping" using pictures of the grocery items. They connect products with brand identities and search for good deals. Another partner, Alex, talked about how she helps her students learn the skills of prediction and sequencing with respect to science content. She copies titles and sentences from the books to create tags and her students use these tags to sequence sentences to make paragraphs. She also asks the students to predict what sort of information will be available under these tags. This helps students understand how information is organized under various topics.
Toni, a high school teacher, shared how she helps students make sense of the mathematical concept of area. She talked about how this strategy not only helped the students understand the concept of area, but also helped them see the relations between various geometric figures and the relation between the areas of these figures.
Dave who teaches elementary brought a series of partial drawings that he uses to help his students with autism learn by labeling the missing parts or drawing them in. He also mentioned how he uses a portfolio and a checklist to show progress with non-readers and non-writers, especially as parents want to know how their children are doing. He highlights the work the children are producing. Students in their group also talked about how to introduce the concept of money to children. Paul talked about how he starts teaching about money using coins. They are all easy to identify because of their different sizes and colors. He works with pennies to begin with for two reasons: pennies are the lowest unit, and also because it is a different color and the most easiest for students to identify without being confused.
Toni shares how she used her artifact to help studentsmake
sense of the concept area in mathematics
Dave brings in student work to demonstrate students
learning science terms visually.
