E is for Election Day

Election Day is just around the corner and with this comes with great excitement in America.  Understanding our election process is an important part of our Humanities curriculum in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.

To help students in grades 2-5 deepen their understanding about this process, Dr. Newell has purchased copies of this book to be read to our students.  Teachers will have access to a suggested lesson plan (complete with grade level TEKS correlated to the lesson) to use with this book.  We are confident that this book will help teach the students in GCISD more about this important American process and the importance of voting!

For more information about the book and author, visit this link: 
 E is for Election Day

Humanities Campus Visits - Snapshots from Grapevine Elementary

This week, I had the pleasure of continuing my campus visits with a day spent at Grapevine Elementary.  What a great day I had meeting students and seeing the great things going on with the GES Stars!

There were many noteworthy things to share that I'll spotlight below, but I also wanted to celebrate a couple of unique opportunities I had at the school.

Breakout EDU is a new movement across the district that was initiated by Suzanne Barker, one of our instructional coaches.  At GES yesterday, fourth graders got to participate in this exercise which tested their problem solving skills, teamwork, and determination.  While I was in the Learning Commons snapping pictures of this experience, I truly don't think a single student noticed my presence. So focused were they on the task at hand! I love it when kids are working so hard and having so much fun that they have no idea they're actually learning lots as well!

Another unique aspect of my visit was that yesterday was one of the VALOR visit days in GCISD.  While I was visiting Ms. Hickerson's room, she was also being observed by her VALOR colleagues from some of GCISD's middle schools.  If I was accurately reading the minds of the observers, I think it'd be safe to say they were impressed by how rigorous conversations could be at the elementary level and the kind of skill it takes to manage a classrooom of eager 3rd graders with lots of energy! It's exciting to see how VALOR continues to transform GCISD's educational practices and build in vertical alignment in ways to help to strengthen our system.

In addition to these unexpected opportunities, I saw many, many examples of teachers implementing our new GCISD Humanities curriculum.  A few of these were:

• Writer's notebooks that have become an integral part of student's workshop experiences.  These were decorated with personal artifacts, organized according to topic, and contained lots of examples of written drafts and skill lessons that will certainly strengthen students' writing.
• Teachers conducting mini-lessons on key reading skills AND students clearly applying these skills in the independent reading they subsequently did.  I saw many students with "eyes on text" as Lucy Calkins refers to it.  
• During one of these mini-lessons in 2nd grade, I loved hearing students spontaneously discuss the traits they liked most in books written by Kevin Henkes.  One student also declared that "When Mr. Henkes wrote ____, he was most definitely writing to entertain us!"  Clearly, author's purpose has been a recent part of this classroom's dialog. 
• Thinking Maps were alive and well at GES.  The maps were displayed in many of the rooms, and one student declared during a lesson that when "we do a double bubble map to compare two books, we're also making a text to text connection." Well, yes, young lady, we ARE doing that! :)
• Yoga mats! In one second grade classroom, the teacher not only invited students to read around the room in a comfortable location, but she also kept a collection of yoga mats in the corner that students could use to designate their own comfy reading space during their work.  
• Anchor charts galore! It was very clear by looking at the walls that students had participated in creating anchor charts with their teachers and they were still being used. This was evident because either the anchor charts were hanging low enough for students to see and refer to and/or they were well organized in an area of the room used for frequent reference.
• Small group work was clearly an integral part of many teachers' classrooms.  It was exciting to see students receiving their "just right" level of skill instruction at tables with their teachers.

For a glimpse into the pictures I snapped during this week's visit, GCISD teachers can click on this link and see the pics from a variety of GES classrooms. Again, I'm so grateful that teachers have been so inviting as these visits have been taking place.  Getting to see our new curriculum in action has been a treat like no other!

Suzanne

Humanities Campus Visits - Snapshots from Bear Creek

In my second campus visit this week, I got to meet many Bear Creek students and see the great things going on in their classrooms.  What a treat!

A few of the highlights of my visit were:

• The creative, thoughtful examples of various word walls in classrooms
• Students writing with confidence and adding details to their stories in their writer's notebooks
• Captivating read alouds that masterfully wove together a focus on the social studies concepts along with reminders about text features that had recently been discussed
• Small group reading instruction in intermediate grade classrooms that was focused on "just right" books and students working to identify non-fiction text features while wearing their "scary" pointer finger 
• Teachers teaching their students about the Cornerstone Task rubrics that would be used to help score the completion of the task for the upcoming unit
• Students completing Google forms with adjectives from the sensory exploration they had just completed
• Students in conferences to help each other apply the editing and/or revision mini-lessons they recently experienced
• The "Book Talk" sign-up sheet on the wall in a 3rd grade classroom where students can volunteer to give their peers a book talk on something they want to share

Several great photos of these and other highlights can be found at the following link (viewing is only accessible by GCISD teachers). 

Enjoy!

Humanities Campus Visits - Snapshots from Bransford

Now that our launch of the newly written GCISD K-5 Humanities Curriculum is underway, I'm having a great time visiting classrooms looking for evidence of some of the great features teachers are implementing.  During a series of half-day visits to campuses, I'm trying to visit every Humanities classroom and snap a few pictures of things that colleagues around the district might enjoy seeing.

My first visit took place this week at Bransford Elementary.  I saw some outstanding examples of teachers following the new curriculum, working on Cornerstone Tasks, transitioning to a reading/writing workshop model, and spreading a love of literacy. A few highlights of my visit were:

• Seeing teachers make brave transitions into a workshop model of instruction - I got to see mini-lessons, examples of Units of Study usage, mid-workshop interruptions by teachers, small groups working on writing skills, anchor charts galore, and students using sticky notes to capture thinking and apply learning from their day's lesson. 
• Watching students learning about historical figures using their iPads and Blendspace resources on a variety of people
• Listening to students in a read-aloud discussion using vocabulary and schema that made it evident that social studies instruction has been a rich part of their classroom experience
• Noticing the variety of creative furniture configurations in each grade - tables with no legs, picnic benches, comfy reading corners, rocking chairs, bean bag chairs, wall-mounted desks - there really was a unique learning space for every type of learner in many classrooms

There were so many good practices to celebrate! I tried to snap pictures of things I thought other teachers might like to see.  I've saved them in a Google Folder that is accessible to other GCISD teachers who click on this link. Enjoy!

GCISD Humanities Curriculum - The launch!

Eighteen months ago, K-5 teachers in GCISD began the massive undertaking of crafting a new and improved, integrated Humanities curriculum.  Sixty-six teachers worked together during the 2015-16 school year to dissect the TEKS, craft cohesive ELA and SS units around Cornerstone Tasks, and establish some non-negotiable instructional structures for reading and writing instruction (workshop model). As anyone who has worked in a school system knows, change is not an easy, overnight process.  During this first year of implementation, teachers are having to reconsider the timing of skill instruction, place emphasis on different social studies concepts and assess them differently, and in many cases, learn a new model for how reading/writing instruction takes place.

During September, the team of GCISD Humanities instructional coaches and I spent time with every grade level team at every elementary campus to discuss implementation of the new curriculum.  In these PLCs we fielded many questions about planning structures, resources, and general navigation of the curriculum housed in Google Drive.  Overall, around 90% of the feedback on and reaction to the curriculum was positive.  As we work with teachers during this year, there will be things that need to be adjusted and professional learning to be offered in support of what the curriculum expects teachers to do.  In general, I am now beginning to believe that our goal of having a more aligned horizontal and vertical system of Language Arts and Social Studies instruction is within reach.

During the next several blog posts, I'll be spotlighting the campus visits I'll be making between October and December.  I'll be spending a half day at each of our eleven campuses over the next few weeks and can't wait to share some of the creative ways teachers are personalizing and utilizing the new curriculum.

Suzanne