fourth grade teachers – It's all good, really!

i’m just a level 2

With all the testing pressure we teachers have all felt, our students, themselves, feel that pressure even more, and too often their self-worth becomes tied to their test results…”I’m a Level 2″; “I’m not a Level 5”; and so on. It REALLY bothered me when I heard my students talk like that! I couldn’t seem to change their minds, so I started looking for a way to share with my students inspiring words from other people and then have my students apply those encouraging words to their own life.

inspiration

I decided to create a collection of inspiring quotes from many different people. I also decided my students needed to know a little about the person, especially if the person was not familiar to students. So each person’s page has their quote and a short bio about the person. I also decided that my students needed to do more than just look at the quote and read the biography. Here’s one of my students responding to Henry Ford’s quote!

This became our Wednesday morning meeting! Here’s what I did…first I had my students copy the quote into their writing journals. Then my students read the biography. Each page also had questions for my students to record their answers to go along with the person’s quote. I didn’t leave it right there. Once, everyone had finished writing their answers, the class then discussed both the quote and their answers to the questions on the page.

It really amazed me how so many of my students took the quotes to heart…it was what I had hoped for! It’s Growth Mindset . Check it out!

sharing is caring!

As I accumulated the facts about George and Abraham, I began to think about how to share these facts with my students. It was an easy decision to make a game of it all. Part of why I create products is to make learning fun for my students while also making life easier for my teacher friends. Here was a perfect opportunity to share what I had learned with both my students AND friends!

Celebrate With George and Abraham

I created a “FACT” or “FIB” sort to have students read statements about each of the presidents, and after discussion, decide whether it’s a fact or a fib. I have included the answers for teachers. I also thought it would be fun for students to then take their newly acquired facts and create an acrostic about either president or both! I’ve included a short assessment or pre/post worksheet and also a Venn diagram to compare the two presidents.