Accidentally, A Good Lesson

There's a great teacher in our district who has made a Power Point for everything imaginable relating to the curriculum he teaches. I thank the stars everyday that he teaches my grade and has put all of his creations on our sharing server. He has made Power Points that are oh-so-handy for benchmark reviews, and, incredibly, a Power Point for each and every lesson in the Science and Social Studies books. I don't always use them, but they're a nice tool to have in my teacher toolbelt. There is one set of his Power Points that I have used daily for the past 3 years and that's the set he made to review our weekly reading vocabulary and skill/strategy.

Typically, I've used these Power Points to introduce the new vocabulary set each Monday, and then I run through it everyday to do a quick vocabulary review. However, this week I was out on Monday and Tuesday for training (probably more about that later). If I'm out, my laptop is with me, so my sub couldn't use the weekly Power Point. If you're a teacher, you know how it is when you've been out--you wonder how well your sub did at teaching and so you do a thorough job when you get back of reviewing what was taught (or not) while you were out.

That's what I was doing yesterday when I found out, quite by accident, that maybe there's a better way to use these Power Points. My students had been working with the vocabulary words for 2 days. On this, the first run-through with the Power Point, I found that I was able to really take them to a higher level of thinking by asking them to predict what the picture would be. They knew the definitions, but I was asking them to apply the definition and brainstorm what would be a good picture to illustrate each definition. I was gobsmacked at how well this worked for them. For the word "vain", they came up with ideas that clearly illustrated they knew what the word meant--predictions like "a woman putting on make-up", "a TV star", and "a model". Then they laughed aloud when the picture was shown--a silly, girly peacock who was holding a mirror in her hand. Next week, I'm going to introduce the words on Monday without the Power Point and then use it on Tuesday and see if it works again. If nothing else, it will shake me out of the rut I seem to have fallen in with my vocabulary instruction. I think anything that becomes a routine becomes forgettable (and yawnable).

And, so it goes. Being away from my class helped me learn something useful. Life's like sometimes. :)