Student-Led Learning Community

We consider our class a family and we especially love to let students be in charge!  The students work together to develop learning routines and habits that foster learning AND leadership!  Today I turned over the reigns to let students lead our spelling sentence discussion.  Each morning, a student reads the spelling sentence aloud and all the students write down each word, practicing handwriting, spelling, grammar and punctuation as they go.  In the afternoon, we take a second look at our work and we put it on the board cooperatively and we have discussions about our thinking.  We might listen to a friend spell a word a different way and realize our mistake on our own paper.  We might have a polite discussion about our thinking and discover we were right all along!  We might also discover new things as we did today!

We start by telling our student leader (in this case, Judah) how to spell each word.  Students are called on randomly and are expected to be following along and listening to each other.

The student leader won't make any changes.  In this case, Judah wanted to see if his classmates would notice his capital letters in the wrong places (they did!)  The class works together to fix any errors on the board.

Then the class discusses any parts of speech they can find in the sentence.  Today Blake had a wonderful discussion that led to the discovery that "my" is a type of adjective!  We use symbols to mark the parts of speech to help not only identify the words (sometimes it's just too hard to remember the word "preposition") but also to involve both sides of our brain in the process!

When our student leader has marked all the changes and all the parts of speech, each student corrects his/her own paper and (hopefully) thinks about any errors that were made.

Great first day of SLLC's, BUGS!!