Feature Posts

Last week, Lydia did a great post on Individual Whiteboards.
You can do SO much with Individual Whiteboards.  I play tons of games with my students using these whiteboards.  (P.S.  If you don’t have cheap individual whiteboards available to you, you can make them easily by laminating cardstock!–You can even color code them into teams that way!!)
My students love the vocabulary review game in which I will split the class into 2 teams.  Give every student a whiteboard and a marker (and an eraser object).  Have two students from each team come up to the front and stand FACING the class.  Behind the heads of the two standers, you hold up a vocabulary word on your whiteboard.  The rest of the class must draw a picture of the word on your board.  (ALTERNATE VERSION: Have them write the first word in Latin that comes to their mind.  Or you can have them write the first word in English.)  When and ONLY WHEN you say “show!” the drawers/writers show the boards to the two standers.  The standers must use the pictures/words to guess the word on your board.  First student to yell the word correctly gets a point for their team.
You can also have students gather in groups and have them write definitions of specific animals, without putting the animal on the whiteboard.  Have groups trade tablets and guess the other groups’ animals.
Have students write one half of a Conditional statement on one board and the other half on a second board.  Mix up the Protases and Apodoses and make a bunch of ridiculous conditionals.
And you can keep going.  🙂  Play Taboo, play Battleship.
What are some ways that YOU use individual whiteboards in your classroom?
Happy Whiteboarding!!

So far this year, I’ve gotten the most bang for my buck from school supplies by adding individual whiteboards to my classes.
Target currently is selling (in the dollar area) individual whiteboards made to look like sheets of paper. They also have whiteboard markers at two for a dollar. At the start of the school year, they had miniature whiteboard erasers at two for a dollar, but I haven’t seen them recently. It would be easy to erase the boards with scraps of fleece, tissues, or, as we did with the slates we used for this kind of activity back when I was in school, orphan socks. In the past, I’ve seen people use cut up slices of shower board, but these are around the same price and my students really like the fake notebook paper design.
I bought large ziptop bags and made up a kit for each student, each of which has a board, marker, and eraser. They live in a copy paper box until they’re ready to be used, when each student in class gets a bag.
There are a variety of things we use the whiteboards for, but I usually ask a question and have students write the answers and hold the board up. Everyone participates this way and I go around “Yes…Yes…Check your answer…Yes.”
What I use the whiteboards for depends on the level. Recently I used them with my sixth grade class to review endings of the second declension: I called out a case and number and they wrote the ending. In my elementary Classics class, I used the boards to review locations of major Roman provinces (I numbered each one on a map on the board and had students write down the numbers).
The students enjoy using the whiteboards much more than other things that let them review or practice. It lets me see how everyone in the class is doing, not just one person I call on, followed by a bunch of nods.

I have been having the midyear blues lately; I become stressed and doubtful when I think of my students’ speed, competency, and skills. I suffer quandaries of pedagogy as I try to wrestle the balance between memorization of details and application of knowledge; induction, deduction, and production; comprehensible input and the analytic morass of charts. I tend in most things to be a moderate, a scavenger of bits of all sides of an argument or philosophy. In my experience, too much of any one principle or idea can narrow one’s vision. On the other hand, the chaos of an open tent approach can be exhausting.
Sometimes we need to get out of the theoretical clouds and get back to the simple earth. Concrete activities work way better than abstraction. Here are some OTHER people’s ideas for things that work in their classes. I hope they will inject some fresh ideas into my room and yours.
1-3-10 Write (Via @MartinaBex)
This offers a scaffolded approach to writing. Students successively write for 1, 3, and 10 minutes, improving each time.
Word Chunk Game (Via @silvius_toda)
A game in which students listen to comprehensible input, collaboratively decide on meaning, and combine basketball-like elements. Sounds fun!
“The Art of Reading Latin: How to Teach It” (Via @calpunzel)
There were proponents of natural order listening and reading back in the 19th century.
Untextbooking: What Does the Fox Say? (Via @rachelcinis)
A whole series of lessons based on comprehensible input, that uses the now famous song as its impetus.