(August) JigSaw 102,010 years of Bead History

The snow is covering the ground and it's long overdue for my first official blog post. It's not that I haven't been working on my professional goal - I have - and I continue to work on it every week and it's always in the back of my mind and always in my reflection notes from my lesson plans. However, with all the preps this year, I'm focusing on stellar lesson preparation which eats up most of the hours in which I'm awake and leaves very little time for typing up those notes I wrote down in the first place. So here it goes and welcome to reading!

My professional goal for this year is to focus on incorporating literacy strategies in my classroom (trying at least one for a new unit/month). This year I'll be working with the ladies in my department at the JH to integrate reading strategies into our FACS curriculum. (On a side note: I am utterly disappointed in the amount of resources FACS teacher have at their disposal. There are speciality books (SIOP, reading strategies, lesson plan ideas, etc.) for almost every discipline expect for the Career & Technical Education folks. It's like book publishers don't think we do anything but sew and cook! Yes, all of the standard books are applicable but it's disappointing to see resource books for ALL but our content area out there).

My first goal: to help my student better understand the history and meaning of beads throughout the world. Throughout history and for thousands (more correctly, HUNDREDS of thousands) of years, beads have served various purposes to people. In search of an encyclopedia of bead history, I went to the public library seeking just that - any and all books that would not only educate me better on the topic but be useful to my students. I wanted to find something that wasn't too long in length but was descriptive and rich in history. Well, out of the 10+ books I checked out, I found one that definitely did the job. Only problem - it was 396 pages, an amount that was a bit much for a semester course. It is called "The History of Beads: from 100,000 BC to present". I read much of the book and since it wasn't my book, marked it up with many post-its of essential information to our course - trying to figure out what was most important. After reading other materials, I decided that I would settle on 7 areas of the world that students would investigate to help them better understand the role beads served in societies around the world. I labored through color coded each country keeping in mind I have a few EL's in my class and a handful of students with lower reading scores. At this point, it might be helpful to know that I seat students according to their reading scores in my classroom, Low(L), Low-Medium(LM), Medium-High(MH), High(H) - Kagen Strategies. I do not seat Low's next to High's because I want the opportunity to say "turn to your shoulder partner and...." and the ability levels between L and H is just too great and might provide frustration. Depending on a student's reading level, I gave them an appropriate section from the book. Those who were lower reading levels, received a more brief section (3 or 4 paragraphs v. 5 or 7) which I purused for difficult language.

• I introduced the materials and reviewed the Content and Language objectives with the students. I handed out the readings according to their reading levels. I told them they could write questions or highlight the sheets as they needed but they needed to come up with the 3 main points of their section.
• I got them into their same colored paper groups and had them come up with as a group, the top three points and see if they had any questions as a group.
• Rather than having students, go back into smaller groups - I have one student in the group report back to the classroom by writing their main points on the board and then explaining them to the class.
• After each group had gone, I then went through my notes of what I thought were the key points in each section. Many of the students mirrored my own summary of the information.

I think this was a useful strategy in this particular case. When we don't have an endless amount of time in the classroom to cover 102,000+years of history, we've got to adapt. Jigsaw is perfect for that. However, I feel like I can always do more. I'm rarely satisfied with anything unless it's gone through a few different renditions. Maybe next time, for review, I could have students play pictionary in small groups or something more hands-on to piggy back off the literacy strategies.