Anchor Charts of Settings

The most interesting conversations that students have between each other are ones that occur when they do not think the teacher is listening. While working in groups seems to be new to these scholars, I did not want to monitor everything that they did in groups. I wanted them to work out their issues, such as who would write. Whoever got to write was a BIG deal to this group of students. Collaborative work is a task that needs to be mastered in order to successfully move to project based learning, which is a goal of this semester. 

While I was interested in the connections the students made on their picking out the setting and character traits of a character in each setting, I really wanted to see how their presentation skills were. After the students were finished creating their anchor chart, I had them present their ideas to the rest of the class. Making sure everyone in the audience was paying attention, we carefully went over what it means to present and how it looks to be in front of a group and how we are supposed to act during a presentation, being the presenter or in the audience. I made sure while the students were presenting that each student contributed something to the conversation. (This point was made earlier in the lesson so the students were mentally prepared to present). I was pleased with the presentations, I tried to allow the students to present without my questioning leads, however, some groups were more comfortable answering the questions I asked rather than leading their own presentation. Which this is completely fine with me. I think that getting up and presenting is a huge accomplishment, and we can only get better with our presentation skills. 

I took some pictures of the students' works that they did in their groups. I wanted to get a variety of skill level pictures and different settings :) 

I'm not sure why these are upside down, I haven't figured out how to fix this, yet. Just stand on your head for a second :) 

We completed this one together as a group to help the students understand what I wanted them to do. We choose the setting of Mt. Vernon, our school, and used our teacher, Mrs. Frobos as our character. We found the different important settings in the larger setting and told how the "character" was affected in each setting. Our "evidence" that these traits were true came from asking Mrs. Frobos :)