Students have fallen into bad habits already of waiting til the last minute to do the work – today we emphasized how impossible it is to learn 60 pages of science in one night – and that LearnSmart is meant to give them practice everyday in manageable chunks that they can do over time to learn and refresh what they are learning…Hopefully they start to catch on – lots of individual conversations today about what needs to change and that they can be successful if they just do the work! I hope they do… Optimism is my meditative word this semester!
We did vocab strategies today with three additions to the usual suspects… “Not your Momma’s Index Cards”, “SEE-I”, and “Almost but Not Quite” – They’ll incorporate this into their Cornell Notes for next week for CH 3.
Grading
LearnSmart completion = 30%
Reading skills Toolbox assignments (Cornell Notes, vocab, concept mapping) = 30%
ELLI reflections = 30%
Participation = 10%
This is driving some behavioral changes, thank heavens…hopefully eventually they’ll do it b/c they want to…
ELLI Reflections
They began their learning autobiographies and so far they are really great!!! They are writing about themselves as learners in and out of the classroom. I shared mine with them too, so it felt more equal. I’m hoping this will start to become really interesting for them as we think about their actual lives and improving their own Learning Power.
Exam #1 for BiSc is tomorrow – Dr. Blay and I are holding our collective breath for the results – AND we can start to crunch some numbers…