A Good, Old- Fashioned Lesson

Since September, I've been at a loss to figure out how to reach my 3rd grade classes. (You know the kind of students I'm talking about- there must have been something in the water that year!) Frankly, I haven't known what/how to teach these kids since they were in kindergarten.

Today, we had a red letter day. The kids felt successful and they learned something. How did this happen? I selected several volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia and wrote the name of a woman on a 3X5 card that I tucked into the volume. I told the kids that ,working with a partner, they were going to look up and read about the woman whose name was written on the card inside their encyclopedia. Some of the kids struggled just to locate their woman, but we persevered, and they were anxious to share what they had learned. One thing that helped is that by this point in the school year, I know who the struggling readers are and I gave those students shorter encyclopedia articles. For instance, Tyrell and Charlie had Babe Didrikson Zaharias. The first line of the article states that "she is considered the greatest female athlete in sports history." They didn't have to read the whole article- the information they needed to share with the class was in the first sentence. (But they were happy to tell us that she was great at basketball, swimming, track and field, and golf.) Carly and Natalie had to read about Eleanor Roosevelt and, needless to say, there was a lot more text to read.

The point is, the entire class enjoyed this activity and asked if we could do it again.

Whewwww. That's me, breathing a sigh of relief and satisfaction because these rascals (did I mention this grade is very boy- heavy?) were engaged in active learning and their desire to continue down this path really is gratifying.

Upon further reflection, I realized something else: the hardest students to reach were engaged in a learning activity that did not involve technology of any sort. It was a good, old- fashioned let's-look-it-up-in-the-encyclopedia activity. Bulls-eye!