Last Friday, we had Pioneer Day. One of our activities was to collect "emotion words". We had a quick lesson, definition, example, and students were sent off to read, identify emotion words, and define them.
Often, education is an on-going learning opportunity that never ends. What you think will be difficult, what you have planned a detailed lesson with practice, may not be necessary for the current group of students you are teaching. As a teacher, you constantly monitor, adjust, and move the lesson as needed to meet the needs of the current students. Other times, you believe it will be a basic review, a quick reminder, and practice to "make sure they got it", only to observe and realize you need to back up, and really develop the idea and practice opportunities.
Our "emotion words" lesson on Pioneer Day was a "retreat", plan and prepare for more learning! This is one of the benefits of a flex reading experience. You can pull aside the students who are struggling, reteach, and develop the information in the detail those students need. The students who were successful the first time, may work on skills they need to develop. You can provide examples, non-examples, and discussion opportunities that help students clarify the learning and be successful.
We wrote some notes in our notebooks. We are reading Judy Blume's Superfudge. We were able to find examples of emotion words and slight variations that do not fit.
We also had to have a mini-lesson about writing definitions. You need to use synonyms (words that mean the same) and other words when you are writing the definitions. Writing, "happy - means happy", does not show you KNOW the word meaning; nor does it help someone else who is reading your definition learn the word!
Together, we created a class poster to help us.
Examples include:
* happy - means feeling job, glad, pleased
* sad - means unhappy, sorrowful
* angry - means mad, frustrated, a strong negative feeling
* surprise - unplanned, to amaze or astonish, unexpected
* excited - means eager, interested
NOT emotion words:
Physical Actions - things you do
- laugh - cry - yell - hug
They can be used to help you make an inference about emotion words, but in themselves, they are NOT emotion words.
Physical Feelings - describe your body and what it needs
- hungry or thirsty - hot or cold - good or sick
These are often something you can fix or change with action
ANOTHER highlight in education, when you are teaching something and your students are excited, engaged, and WANT to learn. After we finished our second day of reteaching and developing emotional words, students were rushing and asking for time to READ and continue their quest for emotion words. There are these fabulous discussions happening in the room about individual words ... for example, "uncomfortable" could be a physical feeling; as in, I was sitting on a cactus, and it felt uncomfortable poking into my backside or "uncomfortable" as in an emotion word, I was in the middle of a conflict between my friends, and I didn't know what to do. We have talked about multiple meanings of words. It is exciting when students make connections and apply previous learning!
Emotion Words. Just another day on the job!
(If your student struggled on the "emotion word" assignment and has a "lower grade" on School-View, please be patient. REAL learning takes time to develop. Those scores will be improved before the end of First Quarter as students finish up their emotion word learning).
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