No Shhing Here

  The Brainstorm I work with some amazing English teacher colleagues. During last year's remote learning experience, I collaborated with Tonya Buda, an 9th grade teacher, to make writing a research paper as fool-proof as possible. When teaching research writing virtually, we found our lessons to be most successful when everything was in ONE tab - students got lost when they were switching back and forth between windows with a model and their own work.  To combat this, we developed a new writing template that combined all the scaffolded supports on one screen. This method utilizes a table with four columns, one devoted to each of the following: a section or component label, a model, an explanation, and then a blank column for students to type their own work. Here's a link to a table for a simple three paragraph research paper  in Google Docs. I'd strongly encourage you to make a copy of the Doc and reformat it to meet your OWN expectations and reflect the models you've d...

A virtual relaxation room is my 2022 version of a Bitmoji classroom. It's an interactive scene - most objects in the room are clickable links - that provide opportunities for students to de-stress and chill out. Here's my PDF version . There are MANY different digital activities you can add to a virtual relaxation room. This room, for example, links to calming music, guided meditations, a virtual lava lamp, a fish tank cam, coloring pages, cute puppies, and a set of virtual bongo drums.  Above: This is a screenshot of the virtual room - to interact with the links, you'll need to open the PDF. I really enjoyed creating this scene in Canva - there are so many options for graphics (with transparent backgrounds!) and it's easy to add links to each item, then export to a PDF.  I also wanted to share this great resource (created by Sarah Wood and participants of the Kent ISD Virtual Relaxation Room Course) for virtual relaxation ideas  - so many options!  I'm planning t...

Dicebreakers activities, like the one below, are a great way to integrate student voice and student choice into community-building activities.  I designed a dice board with two rows -- students roll two dice -- they can use either number horizontally or vertically, giving them two possible questions to pick from for each turn. This gives students an element of choice. If you want to simplify, or you don't have enough dice to provide each group with two, you could always eliminate the top row, and just have 1 option for each number.  If you'd like a copy, you can access the Google Doc here . To edit, go to File --> Make a copy.