It's Time to Discuss

This week, my students made it to their first discussion. They were so excited to jump in to this discussion led by their classmates. This class that I have struggled to get to complete anything all year, was prepared, and actually excited about doing....WORK!

I gave each student a job sheet to record their information that they glued in their reader's response notebooks. The job sheets are below:

Question Writer
Story Mapper
Summarizer

Vocabulary Finder


I also used these job cards from Laura Candler.

For the discussion, the students were given buttons to wear. I know it seems small, but the kids were really excited about getting to wear their buttons.

Here are the buttons for purchase and here are the designs to go inside.

Clipart is purchased from ThistleGirl Designs

Instead of giving the students a sheet to fill in about their discussion, I decided to give them the freedom to record their discussions in the way they felt would work best for their groups. I had 1 group use talk to text on Google Docs. They opened the document, clicked talk to text and recorded their conversations. I had another group use Soundtrap. One of their teammates enjoys mixing music so their discussion was recorded using Soundtrap (this is something I would have never thought of!) Another group used a video recording and another group chose to type their main discussion points on a Google Doc.

I am so glad I gave the students the option of how they wanted to record their discussion. I feel like if I had given them something to fill out, a little of the excitement would have been taken away. Giving them the freedom to choose how they would record their conversations kept them motivated and made them feel like they were in charge of something!