WOTD

Dr. Peterson! Thank you so much for the WOTD (waffles on the deck) experience. It was really a chance for all of us to breathe deeply and enjoy. You and Bob certainly do have it down to a science, and it was so delicious. I loved the buttermilk syrup the most. Could you pass the recipe? Thanks to all the members of this amazing cohort! You're flippant but fantastic:)

Least used -- poor baby

The model I will use least in my Language Arts classroom is vocabular acquisition. Not! Vocabulary is actually in our core. Ha ha. My content excludes none of these models, so I'll have to make a decision based on the number of times per year I will use them. I'll have to go with -- and this breaks my heart -- inquiry. The reasoning for this is that when my students will be doing this, they will be writing a research paper, and those only occur once a year for me. When I use it, I will really use it, but it won't be on a continual basis throughout the year for my classroom. I hate to be grinch-ish about this model, but I can only afford to use it once a year. Rest assured that when I do, it will make my students' brains grow three sizes that day:)

Webquest worth looking at

http://questgarden.com/51/74/3/070524161336/index.htm
One of the units I'll be teaching this year is on Romeo and Juliet, and one of the concepts I love to teach is conflict, and this webquest combines the two. When we talked about true webquests asking students to create a new and unique product as the outcome, I had a difficult time picturing ways to do this. I think this webquest's assignment is excellent: it has students write their own modern day conflict and its resolution. I think this webquest that is already done for me could fit into my curriculum smoothly. I can really see myself using this in a few months:)

Concept Development for me

One way I can see how concept development would work for me is for a piece of our core that is labeled inquiry which is the process of researching a topic and presenting that research. If students could discover and define the concept of inquiry as a whole, they will learn the more specific information of how to cite a source correctly with more ease. I start talking about capitalizing this author's name and putting a comma between piece of information A and B and the students have no concept of why that is important or even have a place in their brain files to store that kind of information. A lot of those rules seem arbitrary and unneccessary to students, but when they understand the inquiry process as a whole, it makes more sense. I'm excited to try this model in a lot of different ways.