Through Microsoft Teams and in-person discussions, I have collaborated and received guidance from our ITS, Jessica Winston, for our Robotics Team. She has helped provide ideas for organizing our engineering notebook and suggestions for getting the program up and running successfully.
I have had the opportunity to collaborate with our reading instruction coaches to create lessons that support classroom content. Some of these lessons include introducing historical fiction, building background knowledge during the time of the Titanic, and exploring biographies.
I offered the Classroom Book a Day Challenge to teachers. Teachers were provided with several picture books to conduct daily read-aloud. I requested that staff who wanted to participate fill out a Google Form and include any specific SEL standard or topic they wanted to spotlight. Then, I pulled several weeks’ worth of books that fit their request and would ignite classroom discussion. Fourth grade and first grade teachers participated in the program.
In collaboration with our third grade teachers, I facilitated lessons on argumentative texts. We discussed the meaning of the word argue and the importance of evidence supporting your stance. To further extend learning, we read the book Don’t let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and completed a Tug-of-War thinking routine.
The collaboration I am most proud of would be the opportunity to work closely with our third grade teachers this year. They recently departmentalized, allowing us more time to spend planning lessons specifically tailored to what they were learning in the classroom. We integrated our knowledge of our previous research lessons, which focused on print and non-print resources, and took it a step further to explore the characteristics of biographies. Students learned the format of
various biography, key features, and how to use these features to find important information. Through modeling and practice, students could locate the requested information for a final project within biographies and put it in their own words. We also revisited citing sources so students could appropriately identify where they got their information. The final product was a biography cereal box in which students decorated it with the facts they gathered from their research.