Common Core Vocabulary

When we started thinking about Common Core and what piece would best prepare our students for this new adventure, we decided to focus on VOCABULARY!! It made sense that our students would be more successful with Tasks if they understood what they demanded. Words like EXPLAIN, HYPOSTHESISE, ORGANIZE, and ASSESS needed to be clearly defined so that our students knew the expectations and how to meet those expectations. With that in mind, we have taken Bloom's Taxonomy wheel and incorporated it in to our daily lesson planning.

 Prior to taking on a new Task, we look at what key vocabulary needs to be demonstrated for a particular task.

Example (below is a portion of a Task covered in Algebra I):

            a. Predict how many flowers you can buy with $52.00 (including the one time service fee).
                Explain your reasoning in words. Try to find more than one way to solve the problem.

Predict and Explain seem harmless, however, our students were struggling to understand what the question was asking and even more challenging was how to respond in a written format. To meet our goals for ONE Task, we completely break it apart to help our students understand the question(s).

Below is a simplified version of Bloom's Wheel, the Blooming Orange.

 Tomorrow's post will include resources, templates, tech ideas, etc., that we have used to begin teaching the vocabulary that is essential for our students to Conquer the Common Core!