One Fix 21/31 #SOL2023

Something has changed. I mean, radically changed in my grade 9 class.

Rather than provide a history, I’ll share something that happened today which seemed to fix student comprehension of paragraphs. And it also helped them think about prefixes.

Here’s the lesson:

With your table group, create a poster using online research to demonstrate knowledge required for paragraph writing in narratives.

Here’s what happened:

They shared rules discovered: a topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and a few other rules which were easy to dispute when we talked about it. All they needed to do was open the books they were reading to realize that not every paragraph in a narrative has a topic and concluding sentence. They crossed out those rules.

And then this idea of “unity and coherence” was raised by one student. I said, “Let’s just figure out unity first.”

So I moved to the board and wrote down the word

“Tell me everyword you know that looks or sounds like the word, unity”.

universe (Marvel)

United (Manchester)

unit (math)

university (“my sister goes there!”)

unicorn

“Unicorn! Tell me about a unicorn!” They all had their hands up to their foreheads immitating the mythological horse when a student said, “the prefix uni must be one, because a unicorn has one horn.” We then back tracked through the words to see the pattern.

They decided we didn’t need a poster to understand the rules of a paragraph. They came together and collaboratively decided that paragraphs just needed the ideas and thinking to be connected — to be as one.