Day 10 - Miriam

What is one new practice you'd like to adopt in the new year?
This will probably be a short post for me, but it is one I'm fairly excited about. Let me start by acknowledging that this isn't my idea. I got it from Bob Patrick and I think he first got it from John Piazza, but if I am wrong, I sincerely apologise! 

One thing that has gotten stale for both students and myself is the practice of "roll call". I call a name and kids respond "adsum". It gets old and kids get a little lazy with the response and sometimes mistakes occur. It's rare, but it has happened that I've marked a kid absent when they were present, but didn't think to respond or hadn't responded loudly enough. Plus, kids get used to it and stop paying attention and talk through it, causing even more issues. 

I'm not quite sure of the original idea, so I hope I am capturing the feeling behind it when I describe it. In addition to this, on occasion, one might have students do a variety of things when responding to roll call. It varies from day to day or week to week. I'm particularly thinking about how to vary this between my three levels next year (1, 2, and 4). Since I kind of discussed this in an earlier post, here are some ideas I'm considering:

1. TPR (kids do what I tell them to do when I say their name) - ALL levels
2. translation sentence (kids translate a sentence when their name is called - the same sentence) - ALL levels
3. Vocabulary word they learned the previous day - ALL levels
4. response to a PQA question - ALL levels to varying degrees of complexity
5. counting numbers - ALL levels, but more consistently in lower levels
6. responding to a question about the previous day's story - ALL levels, but level I will have to wait until they are ready. 

Just a few ideas I'm excited to try. What would you have kids do?