I have implemented Rally Robin and the students were able to talk about the subject. In addition, I have had the students complete tasks to get them talking and they need more practice explaining their thinking. Overall, I believe the more i use it, the better they will do at talking about math.

Conversation Competition/Chat Challenge:

As a way to review for an upcoming science test, I listed 14 vocabulary words that focused on our topic (Waves) and printed them on a 1/4 sheet. The students paired up with a classmate. The classmate with the 1/4 sheet was the "listener" and asked the other student "What do you know about waves?" The "chatter" had 90 seconds to talk about waves. As they chatted, the listener marked vocabulary words off the 1/4 sheet. When they were done, the listener shared with chatter how many vocabulary words they had included in their chat. The chatter that included the most vocab words in their chat got a candy :)

After reading 3 articles on an informational piece, the class was asked to come up with words that could objectively summarize the text. The challenge was then to narrow down the list of words to 7. As we were narrowing down the list, the conversation was awesome in hearing the students defend why they supported the word they wanted on the list.

The students then had the challenge of writing a one sentence, objective summary on the text where they had to use 5 out of the 7 words.

Students performed music that will be performed on their concert and recorded it as a class. After, we listened back to the recording and students were instructed to find areas of improvement and think of solutions for those areas. After they paired with a partner to find similarities or come up with more concise answers. Once the partners teamed up each group shared out to the whole class. This shaped our rehearsal goals for the next week.

I had students talk together about a photograph inferencing activity I do as a warm up called "What's Going On In This Picture?" Each student told their classmate three things they noticed about the image but they couldn't say the same thing. This led to much better logical inferences with more depth and explanation in the final answer because they had more perspectives as to what was going on, and they were collectively able to notice more than as they would have individually.

My students did a rally robin with a partner. We have been working on building number sense and I have been having students rally with different types of numbers. The most recent rally was with prime numbers. The students took turns writing down as many prime numbers as they could think of. This was a great was for them to talk about what a prime number was and then list them with a partner.

I introduced the activity, described what "mingle" looked like. Students then chose a question card, answered it, and then roamed around the class in the style of musical chairs. When I gave the signal they had to stop and find a partner and share their questions and responses and also provide one add-on or piece of feedback. We then repeated the process.

Students were given a vocabulary word to define. Some students struggled. Students shared with a neighbor, then refined their definition. Students were instructed to share with a different neighbor and again refine the definition. Students were instruction to share with a third neighbor, and again refine the definition. Students with more knowledge about the topic were able to help students with less knowledge.

Students formed groups of five and discussed the components of fitness and activities they use in their daily activities. They also learned new activities to implement in their daily activity logs. Flexibility was the most difficult one, but we told them to be specific in their answers for this category.

We completed a Chalk Talk. We are currently writing our first extended written response, and I wanted to make sure students had strong evidence to support their thoughts. We each wrote a piece of evidence on a stick pad in small groups, and then travelled around the room giving peer feedback. Students were asked to either write that the evidence strongly supported and why OR that the evidence could be improved and for what reason. It made my students stronger at reflecting on their own work and verbalizing WHY certain evidence works or doesn't work for a certain task!

Students rotated through a series of questions and when they were given the signal they had to stop and partner up and share how they solved the problem and provided each other with feedback.

We completed a three reads strategy for writing equations when solving word problems. We used padlet to complete the activity. Students were very engaged in the lesson and it helped them to picture what the story problem was about. We then moved to the question and related the question to the variable. After we then found the words that were needed in order to understand how to solve. This has been one of the more successful strategies becaues it got them started with understading the word problems and not require too many steps. As we continued with lessons the students were able to take this understanding to one read but pull out the important information in order to create an equation and then solve.

We also completed a reading in class. A student would read aloud a paragraph, then I called on another student in the class to summarize/pull out key information.

We had two texts (one with few text features and another that was a brochure with many text features). We discussed how text features and the text structure of a document can really help to navigate the text. This was in Social Studies. The kids did wonderfully bring their knowledge from ELA into SS. Their comprehension of the information was much better too (evidence: Their answers to the comprehension questions were of a better quality than what is usually submitted to me.

We did this across two units on different days with documents relating to two different topics/themes.

Socratic Seminar: Students were given a question to research over the course of several class periods. They were also tasked with crafting critical discussion questions related to the topic that they could pose to their classmates. During the Socratic seminar, students discussed the topic, then asked their questions to the group. This allowed for rich discussion among the students.

In math, turn and talk helps with new concepts and determining that many students are confused on the same concepts of steps in math.

We utilized the three reads strategy for reading math word problems. I set it up in a pear deck where we read the word problem. Each round they had something specific to look for in the word problem. Students were able to share in a no confrontational way and as the teacher, I used those comments to start the discussion. After the three reads, we used the CUBES strategy to annotate the word problems on paper. Students were able to discuss later what of these strategies were most beneficial and if a combination of the two strategies would be helpful with word problems or not.

When looking at the Antebellum Period students were shown an image of plantations that was portrayed to the North as new states were forming. Then students were shown actual pictures of life on the plantations. After a large group discussion on comparing the "ideal" version of plantations versus reality, students partnered with their seat buddies and shared their interruption of the "ideal" plantation versus reality and explained how the North would truly feel about slavery if plantations were depicted accurately.