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.
- 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.