Opening Minds

by Nellie (Highlander)

Since the beginning of the year my teacher and I start our language arts class with a quote. The class has to read it aloud and then we select people to interpret what it means or how they can connect it to something in their lives.   The quotes started getting a bit boring so we wanted to try something that would freshen things up.  We opened it up for the students to be able to be teachers for about fifteen minutes of the class and showcase something that they are good at and want their peers to learn.  Each student would teach something for one week, and they would also be responsible for some sort of assessment of the class to make sure they are engaged and learning.  Our first student is very into vocabulary and even goes on a website everyday to improve her vocabulary.  Each day she would teach a new word to the class and then the class would have to try and use it in a sentence to see if they understood it.  At the end of the week she made up a quiz with all the words she taught and they had to match the words with the definition.  For the second part of the quiz they had to choose a certain number of words and then use them in a paragraph, to show mastery.  To this day students are using her vocabulary, and have more of an interest to use words that they might normally not.