I've Been Thinking...How Can I Give My Students a Better Understanding

So I've been thinking...how can I give my students a better understanding of the words that they're learning. I researched some websites for content literacy in a math classroom. I found this great slide show that really helped me find some great ideas. The slide show was called Growing the Connection Between Mathematics and Best-Practice Reading and Writing Strategies with Jennifer Kosiak, Sue Schumann, Ann Harry, and Bonnie Jancik.

We as teachers need to scaffold on our students knowledge by activating their prior knowledge. They talked about a few great exercises but my favorite was called word splash. So the students would be presented with these words as shown below.

Now, it's the students' job to find the connection between the words. How are they related? I think this is a great activity to use because making connections allows us to process information better. It allows students to be creative with their connections and truly think about the importance of each word and how it relates to the others.

The next activity I found in the powerpoint, was called the Teacher Generated Anticipation Guide. This basically helps your students when they are reading a text about math. I will write a couple statements that I think could be controversial or that I think are important. The students will check off if they agree or disagree with my statement, before they start reading. After reading, they have a chance to change their opinion. 

I think this is a nice quick activity. It could be used as a formative assessment to see where our students are at and then how they change their opinions after reading.

The next activity I found in the powerpoint would help with vocabulary. I'm sure many of us have played with a puzzle in our life. They are pretty fun and can sometimes be challenging. We can use word puzzles to help our students have fun while reviewing important information. Here is an example of it below, as seen in the powerpoint.

The last activity I found has to do with comprehension strategies. The first one shows a concept map of all the things that reminds a student of addition. This will help them show all the different ways it is used. The second picture is a cool map that shows a concept of definition map about subtraction. I think this one is really cool because it discusses the definition, similarities and connections we can make, it also shows the concept and gives examples or illustrations. Here are the two examples.

I think I will definitely use these in the classroom. I think they are great tools to help review for tests and show a breakdown of important concepts. 

So since I was thinking about how to help my students understand better, I figure that these strategies will help them to build on prior knowledge and expand for the future, along with having fun:).

~The Teach Fairy