Jentry Youd and His Class Family

TALK      LAUGH      MOVE

Jentry Youd is a UVU graduate who uses Morning Meetings!!! He says that it makes his class! I love hearing about different ways to do morning meetings!! His love and passion for morning meetings really is contagious and exciting! I loved how his style was a new way to do morning meetings. It just shows that we can adapt morning meetings to work for us in our own classes!

Jentry does Morning Meetings every morning in his class. He does an ACTIVITY, a SHARE, and they cover a GOAL. These goals vary on what the class may need to work on and they can last for quite some time until they nail it. He has created a Google doc filled with 50 Morning Meeting Activities!!! He shared it with us and I am thrilled to use it!!!

Jentry believes something that we learned my first semester from Professor Adamson. He firmly agrees that EVERY DAY students need to
Talk
Laugh
and Move
I 100% agree with this statement. I know those are three things I need to do every day. Since that is true, then it has to be especially true for growing and developing and learning children.

I loved the stories he shared about how his students love morning meeting, about how he's helped kids with anxiety, or that are going through a hard time such as death of a loved one. I also loved the story about taking Morning Meeting away one day and that solved his classes behavior problem!!

He was so fun and happy. His students reflected that and I hope to have a similar relationship with my students. :)

Meshing Togeher

The Student Seeks   The Teacher Responds  Curriculum and Instruction are the Vehicle!!

After learning about the three important cogs of the differentiation machine, this quote from the Disney movie, The Incredibles came to my mind as a perfect description of how these cogs need to work together:

Bob (Mr. Incredible) and Gilbert Huph (Bob's Boss at Work for an Insurance Company) are at Bob's work in Huph's office discussing the company and it's policies:

Huph: You know, Bob... a company...
Bob: Is like an enormous clock.
Huph: ...Is like an enormous cl... Yes, precisely. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together. A clock must be clean, well lubricated, and wound tight. 

I hope my classroom and also all of my students together will work together in this manner as Huph described in the movie. If we do everything right, the machine should run smoothly. :)
I hop

The Vessel in which the Force is Driven!!

Chapter 5
The third cog and completion of our differentiating mechanism!!
Curriculum and Instruction as the Vehicle
Important
Focused
Engaging
Demanding
Scaffolded

Memorization of material is a poor poor way to try and learn something. Instead one should learn to make meaning of any given information and tools of how to figure other information to solve problems!!! Precision and understanding must come from teacher in student. Both must share in knowledge of why they are learning what the are learning. Make it fun!! Make it hands-on!! Make it unique and interesting!! Inquiry!! Scaffold them in their individual and class ZPD!!!

The student can have needs, the teacher can respond to those needs, but without anything to learn and a great way to learn it then there is not point to the clock and it won't work!!! The three must interact together!! I think this is so true and so important. The curriculum, the teacher, and the student must work with one another for optimum learning to occur!! I hope I can bring all three of things together in my own class.

Fav Point:

• Balancing knowledge, understanding, and skill.
• We have to some of all three and we have to make them work together equally!! 

Directing the Force!!

Chapter 3

The second cog of the differentiating clock!!
Teacher Response: a starting point for differentiation.

Invitation

Opportunity

Investment

Persistence

Reflection

As we learned in the previous post, the student are seeking for things as they are learning. In order to guide those needs where the need to go the teacher has to respond to them! Send good vibes to the students! Invite them with who you are, let them know they are valued and respected. Give them opportunities, let them know they have those opportunities and that they CAN do it. Persistence is key! Don't just drop it if a student isn't getting it! Try a new approach!! Make it happen! I think Reflection may be the most important part of this cog. You have to review and reflect and rethink as you are working with the students to help you achieve all the other portions. 

Without the teacher's response to the needs of the students, the students needs won't be met and that defeats a lot of purpose in our goal as educators! We want them to learn! I want them to learn! :)

The Force of Differentiating

CHAPTER 2

The first cog of the clock!!

The Student Seeks

Affirmation

Contribution

Power 

Purpose

Challenge

Give the students what they seek!!! Give them that X that marks the spot they are knowingly or unknowingly searching for!! They want to know why they need to know something. They want it to be worthwhile and stretch their muscles. They want to be apart of the process and they want to feel loved!! help them out!

I want to give my students what they need and even what they want. Most importantly I want them to feel right on the edge of comfortable so we can expound their schemas and create new ones!

Some key points I found in chapter 2:

• (My fav) Student needs are the impetus for differentiation. 
• The needs of the students are what drive the differentiating!! It is not random!!
• Emotions trump learning, need to feel safe. 
• Nobody retains or likes information the learn learned when bored, scared, or ignored!

5/18 Pay It Forward!!!!!

Have I talked about how morning meetings bring people together? They are filled with love and friendship. I beleive my own morning meeting that was held in my college class as a practice session was a fine example of this particular concept. I shall tell you about how it went. 

FIRST! We set up the chairs in a circular shape! 
ALSO! We had a poster on the board that said "Secret Acts of Kindness" and we had five people sign up to share a time where they had either given or received an act of kindness. We also had everyone in the class anonymously write something nice or that they liked about another in the class. 
GREET! Then we had a greeting that is similar to the games "Signs" We each went around the circle and picked our own sign, repeating each persons sign after they did to try to ingrain it in our brains. Then one person starts by doing their sign and then doing someone else's sign. That someone else accept their sign and does a third persons sign. The second person sits down then because they have been greeted. We continued in this manner until everyone had been greeted silently. It was lots of fun picking signs and then giving the signs.
SHARE! We then had five people share the time they had an involvement with a SAK. It was very touching. Some of the things were personal adn others were like someone bought their groceries at the store for them. For each sharing, they were asked about three ish questions or comments about it. It was very touching.
ACTIVITY! Secret Elf. (from the book "99 Activities and Greetings: Great for Morning Meeting" by Melissa Correa-Conolly) We sent one person to the corner, then as a group we said "Elf, elf, there's an elf on my shelf and the elf is..." Then someone would volunteer to be the elf and they would say ina disquised voice "I'm the elf!" the person in the corner would then have three guess as to who is was. It was really fun!
DISCUSSion type thing! Lastly we pulled down the poster and read all of the different things people had said about each other. It was very touching and heart-warming. We talked about paying it forward, where you pass on acts of kindness done to you. We encouraged our class to do so. 

I really had a lot of fun and I felt like everyone in the class also had fun. I learned a lot about my classmates adn felt like it built our community and vocabulary and ideas. I love morning meetings. :)

4/18 New Insights

I've learned some new analogies to apply to the 9 Hallmarks to help us better understand and utilize these classroom differentiation strategies. Remember the definitions I gave a few weeks ago? Well keep those in mind and feel free to reference them. This post is an expansion of those definitions that I learned from my fellow future teachers at school. Here we go:

Hallmarks!

1. A strong link between assessment and instruction. 

A puzzle! You got to get the foundation out there to even start putting the puzzle together. You gotta start somewhere, so you put the edge together. Then you you find all the connections and the links. To put it together. BUT, you have to keep referring back to the picture and the edge and reassessing the whole time to complete it! They are connected!

2. Absolute Clarity about what the teacher wants to know, understand, and be able to do - about what is truly important to learn in this unit. 

The student is blindfolded and the teacher has a map and can see the goal at the end of the maze. The teacher needs move with the student to find the unforeseen circumstances and guide the student to dodge those obstacles! Reach the goal!

3. Shared responsibility for the classroom is between teacher and students in the goal of making it work for everyone. 

Picture a scale. The kind that needs equal weight on both sides to balance. One side is the teachers input, one side is the students. They have to give an equal amount to the learning process!

4. Individual growth is emphasized as central to classroom success.

We are strong as one big link. We have to come together and form a classroom chain with our strengths and weaknesses to keep each other strong, hold each other up.

5. A "way up," unusually through multiple and varied pathways, and never a "way out."

Silly putty! The silly putty is taught a lesson by placing it on a newspaper and it picks up the words and then you need to mold that new knowledge. If you pull to hard, they'll snap!! But if you pull slowly and mend the holes, they'll keep the info!

6. Respectful and engaging work for all students.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference." ~ Robert Frost Different pathways, same end goal. We gotta make those pathways fun and challenging and leveled! 7. Proactive thinking and planning for different pathways.  Going on a road trip. It takes lots of planning, you need a map, start at different places, teacher sees stuff, some are gonna go at a faster place then others! 8. Flexible grouping. A flower garden. For different occasions you'll want different bouquets and flower arrangements! or sometimes you'll want a single rose, etc! 9. Flexible use of time, space, and materials. Bending over backwards and forwards an being willing to change or go to the extreme to get things done!! I am very blessed to be learning in a class filled with all of these geniuses. Their metaphors and connections really helped for the Hallmarks to become real and clear to me. Now I just need to think of my classmates when a particular strategy is mentioned and I know what it is and how to utilize its power. My favorite metaphors would have to be Robert Frost's pathways, the silly putty, and the flower bouquets. They just really hit home with me in their symbolism. I hope these helped you to understand the Hallmarks on a deeper, more personal level as well!!