Spelling is an important literacy skill for all subjects at every year in school. PowerPoint presentation animations can be a useful tool for getting students to practice saying and spelling new words when they are starting a new topic. Here is an example of an automated spelling PowerPoint presentation I’m using with my Year 9 Science class. List 1_Spelling_Practice_Sound
We have just started a unit on sound and light. This presentation contains our first ten spelling words and I like using this style of automated spelling presentation at the beginning of a lesson to help familiarise students with new terms and how to spell them.
If you like this presentation and would like to use your own word list you could download it and change the words the animation will still work. If you’re interested in how to create the animation this page is helpful.
In one week students across Australia will be beginning the new school year. Right now teachers across the country are preparing lessons and classrooms for these students. As I meet people in my everyday life they ask me what I do for a living. When I say I’m a secondary teacher most cringe “I couldn’t do it, the way kids ….” they then proceed to tell me about some negative perception they have about student behaviour. The fact is that we rarely see good news stories in the media about students or teachers. It is true teaching isn’t easy, but it’s also not as bad as it gets portrayed. The majority of students are generally well behaved the majority of the time.
With good pedagogy in both the form of curriculum and behaviour support many instances of poor or inappropriate behaviour can be avoided. This takes planning, patience, and consistency. The beginning of the year is a crucial time for planning how the classroom is going to operate and creating a learning environment that supports positive behaviours.
At this time of year I am focused on two main types of planning:
Content lessons – the curriculum, and
Establishing, teaching and reteaching expectations and routines for positive classroom behaviour.
Teaching, reteaching and re-enforcing with students how to behave is crucially important. It isn’t enough to tell them my expectations and expect compliance. I believe explicitly teaching behavioural expectations and routines is just as important as explicitly teaching the content. It can seem like extra work but I end up losing more time that could be used on the curriculum if I don’t spend time helping students learn how I want them to behave even in high school.
I have many resources I use to help me prepare for teaching my students how I want them to behave and to establish our classroom culture and routines. Here are a few of my favourites.
1.The First Days of School is a book that is an amazingly comprehensive resource for creating and sustaining the classroom culture you want packed full of reusable and downloadable resources.
Image: Better World Books, 2014.
2. Solution-Tree has some great visual posters to assist students learn desired behaviours with reproducibles for Classroom Management and Behaviour.
3. I like to review teaching videos of how exceptional teachers set the culture of their classes. These are my two favourites from the Teaching with Bailey series.
melissayoungteachlearn 