Language Acquisition: Just Roll With It!

This week, while reading aloud from our class novel, we came across the word 'cantilevered'.  As soon as I said it, I immediately thought of what Jannie told us during our last PD session.  

I told the class to remember that word for later. 

Do we do we do more of the same and not make the difference or do we change what we are doing and make the difference?

-Dr. Jannie van Hees

 Once we had finished reading our selection for the day, I asked the class who remembered the word we didn't want to forget.  We then wrote the word on my whiteboard, and talked about where we could look to help us better understand the definition of the word. 

Students were then given the opportunity to spend some time exploring online to discover the definition of the word. There were quite a few that felt empowered and worked together to pull their resources to create their own definition.  These students were also led down a rabbit trail of exploration learning ever step of the way more about bridges and how they are made as a result. 

Near the end of the class period, I Chrome-casted this Google Drawing that was shared on the blogs of the students in this group.  They were able to share what they found with the whole class, and the confidence they had was amazing.  This is definitely something that I will be encouraging my classes to do in the future. 

Check out the students' blogs here: Jerry  Nature  Zoe