For my fall practicum, I helped co-teach Reading Ideas in a high school setting. Unlike 8th grade, high school reading curriculum centered around a core text. In this case, the text was Five Flavors of Dumb written by Antony Johns. Each week, my coordinating teacher and I would present an Article of the Week in relation to the core novel. It was from those articles that I pulled vocabulary words for the week. Linked below is a copy of the vocabulary worksheet I created for weekly vocabulary:
At the end of the week, students were expected to take a quiz on both the core novel and vocabulary. This worksheet was created as a way of helping students identify real-world context of the assigned word, provide an area for visual representation of the word, and come up with meaningful sentences.
Vision Boards
Based off the concepts of Project-Based Learning and Backwards Design, throughout fourth quarter students were assigned vision boards, in which they created online collages of not only the main character in Five Flavors of Dumb, but also themselves.
For their midterm assignment, I assigned my students their first vision board, which was to be about themselves. This gave my students practice with the idea before executing it for their final assessment and it helped with student community building. After their vision boards were created, students were asked to participate in group conversation about their favorite memories/images they included, and their group was asked to assess and give advice on how to improve their vision boards.
Once they were finished with finding their images and constructing their collage, I asked students to construct an artist’s abstract, in which they wrote about why they chose the images that they chose. In the below assignment link, you’ll see I’ve included sentence stems as a way of providing students with more support for this assignment.
Final Assessment
Once my students were finished with their own vision boards, I assigned students the task of completing a vision board for the main character of their core novel, Five Flavors of Dumb. Using this strategy, I was able to scaffold and prepare students for their final project assessment. Essentially, they were asked to do the same thing they did for their own vision boards, but to do it for Piper. Below is a link to the assignment PowerPoint and some student examples.
Chelsea Fritz 