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Having a daily warm-up, SWBAT, do now. Have kids write it down. My SWBAT'S (students will be able too) often include vocab. that not all students can access. So discussing the swbat with the class to get clarification can help build not only language/vocab but community as well

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Frayer style vocab with picture and non-examples, followed by pair-share an a few share outs.

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Mystery box.  Students observe me pouring 50 ml. of clear water into the top of the box, and predicting what will come out the bottom.  They use the observation protocol I notice, I wonder, could it be and then they need to illustrate what they think the inside of the box looks like.
My point being allowing students different ways to communicate their ideas ~ illustration, diagram etc.

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Students will have multiple opportunities to practicing mapping and distance both at school, to and from school and after-school. They will learn how others move through the world.

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Students can come up with their own symbols for representations on the map (ie start point, classrooms, gym, end, distance between each of the classes)

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Students will choose how to construct map.

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Give students a choice of learning assignments that review the same topic. Assign students independent projects where they have to be creative with how they display their learning by making real-life connections to the subject matter.

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Students will compose written sequence visual sequence of or story format of their travel through the day and will incorporate social elements such as who student is with and where they went (SEL embedded with math curriculum).

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Students work in pairs with multiple rounds of sharing out so no one gets left behind as we work on the task

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Practice using descriptive language in narrative. Students could have the choice of writing a descriptive setting or drawing a setting and labeling with descriptive adjectives

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Practice using descriptive language in narrative. Students could have the choice of writing a descriptive setting or drawing a setting and labeling with descriptive adjectives

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Opportunities for academic discourse as review 

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Opportunities for academic discourse as review 

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posting daily learning goals and unit understanding goals

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posting daily learning goals and unit understanding goals

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students build off each others' ideas in a structured manner (ie a worksheet or poster where each student contributes one sentence or word or expands on a previous student's idea)

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students build off each others' ideas in a structured manner (ie a worksheet or poster where each student contributes one sentence or word or expands on a previous student's idea)

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helping with time management by chunking large projects and creating daily goals for time management

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helping with time management by chunking large projects and creating daily goals for time management

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preteach vocab (slideshows that can go in classroom are great for this), give sentence frames, and create student work samples 

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preteach vocab (slideshows that can go in classroom are great for this), give sentence frames, and create student work samples 

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Number paragraphs in any reading, for easy scaffolding and reference 

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Number paragraphs in any reading, for easy scaffolding and reference 

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peer editing as well as teacher editing of essays/writing

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peer editing as well as teacher editing of essays/writing

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lots of options for choice wherever possible

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lots of options for choice wherever possible

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performance based mastery through benchmark progression (charted for accountability purposes)

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performance based mastery through benchmark progression (charted for accountability purposes)

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Transformations: Before, have students engage in prior knowledge of shapes, label them and the parts, and use them to talk about fractions (what shapes are best to represent fractions? what other shapes can you use to represent fractions? e.g. pentagon for 1/5)

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Transformations: Before, have students engage in prior knowledge of shapes, label them and the parts, and use them to talk about fractions (what shapes are best to represent fractions? what other shapes can you use to represent fractions? e.g. pentagon for 1/5)

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Vocab in multiple languages with pictures

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Vocab in multiple languages with pictures

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Sharing vocab lists for families in multiple languages including pictures to promote discussion at home and give lots of exposure to words.

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Drawing is the best way to learn; even if you are not good at it

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Drawing is the best way to learn; even if you are not good at it

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"I just can't draw." It's a refrain most adults say when confronted with a blank piece of paper. Something happens in our teenage years that makes most of us shy away from drawing, fretting that our draftsmanship skills aren't up to par, and leaving it to the "artists" among us.

But we've been thinking about drawing all wrong, says the design historian D.B. Dowd. In his illuminating new book, titled Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice , Dowd argues that putting a pencil to paper shouldn't be about making art at all.

"We have misfiled the significance of drawing because we see it as a professional skill instead of a personal capacity," he writes. "This essential confusion has stunted our understanding of drawing and kept it from being seen as a tool for learning above all else."

Put another way: Drawing shouldn't be about performance, but about process. It's not just for the "artists," or even the weekend hobbyists. Think of it as a way of observing the world and learning, something that can be done anytime, like taking notes, jotting down a thought, or sending a text.

Mistaking drawing for art is embedded in our institutions, says Dowd, a professor of art and American culture at the Washington University in St. Louis. For centuries, schools have lumped drawing with painting and confined it in an "aesthetic cage," he says.

Our anxiety around drawing starts around puberty, when we begin self-critiquing our abilities to render a perfect likeness, Dowd says. "The self-consciousness associated with 'good' drawing, or a naive form of realism, is mostly to blame," he explains to Quartz. "If you take a step back, and define drawing as symbolic mark-making, it's obvious that all human beings draw. Diagrams, maps, doodles, smiley faces: These are all drawings!"

Drawing helps us think better

At its core, drawing is a problem-solving tool. Scientists are often avid doodlers, like the Fields-Medal-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, for instance. "The process of drawing something helps you somehow to stay connected," she explained in a 2014 interview. "I am a slow thinker, and have to spend a lot of time before I can clean up my ideas and make progress."

Even if you're not tackling hyperbolic geometry, drawing is useful for our daily affairs from giving directions, taking meeting notes, outlining an presentation, or making grocery lists. It fosters close observation, analytical thinking, patience, even humility.

An alternative to Google-based learning

Digital technology coddles us by giving us shortcuts to "instant knowledge," but drawing breaks our collective instinct to Google everything, argues Dowd. He cautions against relying too much on easy paths to learning:

When we ask for something from Google Image Search-say "airplane"-we get contemporary definitions of same, which in that case yields thousands of pictures of commercial airliners. That's a narrow result from a general inquiry, and one version of how aggregation keeps us from seeing a wider world. Drawing works in exactly the opposite way: close observation of almost any particular engages the senses and heightens experience, making the world seem bigger, not smaller.

There is a physical dimension to this, too. Our brains got bigger when our thumbs moved into an opposable position vis-a-vis our fingers. Our hands, fixed on the ends of our arms, brought us news of the world, and we evolved rapidly to take advantage. Our manual capacities are critical to our understanding of the world. Isn't it weird, and a wicked paradox, that the digital has eroded the manual?

Dowd, who has been critical of the graphic design industry's over-reliance on digital illustration tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, argues that drawing isn't necessarily anti-tech: "I have no beef with technology per se-after all, pencil and paper is a technology. But drawing offers simplicity and directness compared to other information gathering procedures."

Drawing makes us better humans

There's another fundamental reason for using drawing as a learning tool: It can bring out our better qualities as people. "If practiced in the service of inquiry and understanding, drawing does enforce modesty," says Dowd. "You quickly discover how little you know."

The observation that's necessary for drawing is also enriching. "Drawing makes us slow down, be patient, pay attention," he says. "Observation itself is respectful, above all else."

In the closing chapter of Stick Figures, Dowd argues that drawing can even make us better citizens, in the sense that it trains us to wrestle with evidence and challenge assumptions. "It might seem sort of nutty, but I do think that drawing can be a form of citizenship," he says. "Observation, inquiry, and steady effort are good for us."

This form of individual sense-making is a practice that's ever more vital at a time when we're inundated with falsehoods and bad faith, says Dowd: "When we look hard and listen carefully, how are we not led back to questions of justice, of what is right?"

Perhaps drawing pads should be standard issue in government offices and boardrooms.

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Drawing is the best way to learn, even if you're no Leonardo da Vinci

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Why do so many of us stop drawing when we become adults?