The Connection Is Made

It’s getting down to the end. We have less than six weeks of school left (!!). The weather is  gorgeous. The kids have Spring Fever. The “senioritis” is trickling down to junioritis, freshmanitis, eighthgradeitis, even sixthgradeitis! It’s intermittently testing season and field trip season and schedules are all funky and out of whack.

How on earth do we keep any continuity or connections between topics and lessons from one day to the next?  

Especially when we don’t see one group of kids until Thursday because of testing/field trip/special events?

As usual, my magic wand is in the shop. And my magic bullets are in the mail.  

But it definitely wouldn’t hurt to be more intentional in having kids make connections.

Here are two ideas that you can work in, regardless of how frequently -- or infrequently -- you see your kids this month.

1. 
   Clifhangers: How do we remember the important points of Game of Thrones or whatever TV show we haven’t seen in a while? The shows usually helps us out by leaving us with a cliffhanger at the end of one episode.

Cliffhangers are great for that last one-minute of class when you don’t  have time to start something else. Just throw out a fairly interesting question from tomorrow’s lesson and remind kids to “stay tuned” to find out.

• What are some of the most important Supreme Court cases of all time?
• What is Lincoln going to do when states start seceding?
• How can the Roman Republic stay a republic when it adds all this new territory?
• How smoothly do you think these former colonies are going to move into independence?
• What different areas are going to outwardly fight against integration -- and which areas are going to fight passively?

It’s ok that they don’t have the answers. They’re NOT SUPPOSED TO! A cliffhanger is there to make them curious about the next lesson. It’s supposed to engage their brains a little after your class is over.

We know it’s not likely that they will ponder that question all night and lose sleep over it. But even if it crosses SOME of their minds once or twice, then their brains are “primed” and ready to connect new content to the old content.

Curiosity is a powerful force for engagement and learning. And it doesn’t require a lot of prep to add in.

2. Previously On: The next way to help kids is to regularly ask  kids what they remembered from yesterday’s lesson (or the previous time’s lesson) -- ask as bellwork or during the lesson intro.

There are several ways to do this.

• You can just flat out ask -- “what did you remember from yesterday’s lesson?”
• You can toss out a couple of terms from yesterday and ask what they have to do with the main topic.
• You can ask a review question about the previous lesson, test-style.
• You can ask kids to turn and talk about what they know or remember about the previous lesson’s topic.

3. Connections: Put a couple of terms from recent lessons on the board. Then ask kids to use a certain amount of them (6? 10?) on their paper -- with ARROWS showing how they are connected.

This helps kids explore the connections between topics which helps build schema and solidifies it all in their heads.

It requires the kids to not only know the content, but know and understand how each goes with another.

How can we help kids make connections within and between content? How can we help them keep some continuity when our schedules get crazy? How can we start the review process a little bit at a time?

Help kids make connections. Try it!

And let me know how it goes! Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org

-Tracy