Thursday, March 22, 2012
QUESTIONS?????
Online Stopwatch has given me a solution, at least a temporary solution to a few quandaries I've been having with my sixth grade social studies students. When given an assignment, almost any assignment, they look at it for all of two minutes then immediately begin asking questions. Yesterday we (my teaching intern and I) gave them a guided reading assignment. Many of the questions were simply fill in the blank questions. They began asking us questions before they even opened the textbook! I decided to try something different today with another reading assignment. After I gave them instructions and modeled how to answer a few questions, I told them that for the first 10 minutes that we would not answer any questions unless it was dire (vocabulary builder). I used the rocket stopwatch from the classroom tools section to let them see when time was up. It worked fairly well. They found the answers on their own that they normally would have asked us to find for them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting! I experience the same thing with my college freshmen (if you can believe it). And what a great idea to have them wait 10 minutes. Since they're a little older I just tell mine they're not allowed to ask questions unless they've tried to answer it on their own. Yours is a neat idea that could definitely be adapted for any level of classroom!
ReplyDelete