July Blogging Challenge - More about WICOR

Whew... today was another long day at the AP workshop. Today I took my Chromebook and it might have been a mistake.. :) I spent more time looking up resources and ideas and I'm sure I missed some great take-aways from the presenter. That's okay though.. I still got a few pages of notes and overall felt like I had a productive day.

Hubby's car decided to start acting up around lunch time, so he headed home to take it into the shop. When I got home, we went to pick up his vehicle, then ran to Target... they are starting to put out school supplies!!! The Dollar Spot isn't very organized yet, but check out my purchases:

My hubby couldn't figure out why I was buying magnetic letters since we don't have children nor do I teach elementary school, but last week when I was looking for summarization strategies, one of the suggestions I read was to give each group a letter and they had to come up with a summary word that started with that letter. I'm thinking the magnetic letters in a cute bucket to demonstrate "mix well" will hopefully cement that idea into the class. Since they are magnetic, I can also arrange them on the board for the kids to do a group ABC summary. I should have bought enough sets for each of my whiteboards! UGH - another trip to Target I suppose!

The other thing I love is stickers. The round smiley face stickers get used in my class a lot for data collection. We use them as dots on a dotplot or scatterplot so that the dots are uniform and a good size to see from all locations in the room. The other stickers are for me to try out the "group kudos" idea from the AVID workshop where kids can reward each other during group work.

The final fun thing was the Teacher File Tote. I don't know quite what I'll use it for, but for $3, I couldn't turn it down! :)

More about WICOR
On yesterday's post, @cheesemonkeysf said:

Can you say something more about WICOR? Does this mean you do *one* of these or all five? I love the idea but I need to hear more about it.

First off, WICOR is an acronym that we use in AVID. It stands for Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading. The idea behind WICOR is that of 'Best Practices'. My plan is to integrate at least one strategy each day and put this into my lessons so that I don't forget.

For example, Monday I might have a Quickwrite, which is a Writing-to-learn strategy, on Tuesday, we might do Quiz-Quiz-Trade, which is Inquiry and Collaboration, on Wednesday, we might do an Exit Ticket, another Writing strategy, etc. Some days might have more than one strategy, but the idea is to integrate more active engagement in my lessons.

Here's a sample list of WICOR strategies that I have used:
Quickwrites (W)
Cornell Notes (W/O)
Exit Tickets (W)
Critical Thinking/PBL (I/C)
Think-Pair-Share (C)
Quiz-Quiz-Trade (I/C)
Gallery Walk (W/C/R)
GIST (W/R)
Learning Logs (W)
Card Sorts (I/C)

By making sure that I integrate multiple strategies over the week, I should ideally hit on several learning styles as well.

What are some of your favorite strategies to use with students? I'm always looking to add to my tool box!

July Challenge
I am on a personal challenge to blog every day in July, just to see if I can do it. I would love to have you join me! If you are worried that you've missed a few days, please don't stress.. just jump on in! Maybe a month is too much, that's okay, try it for a week, or every other day, or once a week.. whatever works for you!

Don't forget to visit the other July bloggers and show them some love!
The bloggers (so far)
Robin at Flip! Learn! Share
Bridget at Reflections in the Plane
Teresa at GeometryWiz
Sherrie at Middle School Math Rules!
Brooke at Sined, Sealed, Calculated
John at Functions are Fun
Jedidiah at Math Butler
Pam at the radical rational
Roxy at Rockstar Math Teacher
Paul at TeacherPaulP
Tina at Palmer's Ponderings
Cindy at School Stuff



Add your blog in the comments if you would like to join in! :)
#July2014Challenge