Welcome to Spotlight on Strategies Challenge!  Our S.O.S series provides help, tips, and tricks for integrating DE media into your curriculum.

Stem Completion
PDF Version
*For a link to all the PDFs in this series click here.

Background

Students gain a greater understanding of content when they make authentic connections.  To that end, this strategy uses images and sentence-stem completion to have students make predictions, provide support, and make a personal connection.

Example

• Display the following images in the classroom.
  • Women Baking Bread in a Community Kitchen (CDN Subscribers)
  • A French bakery in New Caledonia (CDN Subscribers)
• Ask students to fold a piece of paper in half and label one half as Image #1, and the other half as Image #2.  On each half, they should complete the following stems.

• I predict this is a picture of…
• I think this because I see…
• An experience from my life that supports my prediction is…

• After discussion and reaching consensus that the images represent baking/cooking, ask students about experiences they may have with baking/cooking with adults.  Lead students to talking about ingredients and measuring ingredients.
• Have students brainstorm ingredients needed to bake a loaf of bread.  Write the list on the board and assign values to each ingredient, including various fractions.
• EXAMPLE:
  • 1 ½ cups Flour                 ¾ tablespoon sugar
  • ¼ tablespoon salt           ½ tablespoon butter
  • 1 1/8 teaspoon yeast       ¼ cup warm water
• Tell students that we will need 3 loaves of bread for the entire class and have them work with a shoulder partner to multiply the ingredients by 3 to determine how much of each ingredient will be needed.

• Pro Tip: Instead of providing the recipe, have students select a favorite food (chocolate chip cookies, macaroni and cheese, etc.) and use the internet to search for a recipe.  Then have them double, triple, etc. the recipe.  Their original and revised recipe can be posted in the room or as a Student Board for classmates to view.
• Pro Tip: Search Discovery Education for additional supporting resources for teaching multiplication such as games, math overviews and explanations.

Challenge

• Select an image (or images) that represents current content to be studied.
• Ask students to complete sentence stems that relate the images to content and personal experiences.
• Build on the student experiences to practice and/or deliver content.

You can take the challenge by:

• Implementing this strategy and letting us know how it went by posting a comment below.
• Using this strategies in your grade level planning discussions and/or professional development and reporting your events. (Remember we consider an event anytime 3 or more educators gather together… doesn’t have to be in a computer lab… could be sitting around the lunch table)
• Photocopying the flier and distributing it in your colleague’s boxes and/or posting it to your own BulleDEN board.

To see other strategies in this series click here.  For a link to all the PDFs in this series click here.