Today was an awesome day in Mrs. Goodman’s third grade class at Echo Lake Elementary. Her students have been working on homophone pairs this week and she invited me into her room to collaborate on a lesson. Julie Smith, another HCPS ITRT, shared an awesome lesson idea on her blog a few weeks ago using CheckThis. After brainstorming with her she helped me come up with a way to use CheckThis for a homophone lesson.
This lesson took just over 45 minutes and it was AWESOME! I was so impressed with Mrs. Goodman’s students. They logged right in and then we started by setting Google Chrome as their default browser (this isn’t necessary for all lessons but since we were going to collaborate on a Google Doc it makes things much simpler). Student launched Google Chrome, clicked the settings tab and then scrolled down and selected “Make Google Chrome my default browser.” Simple as that!
Then we accessed Mrs. Goodman’s folder on the ELES Server Shortcut. Inside this folder I had stuck two links. The first was to a Google Doc. One important thing to note is that I set this Google Doc to “Anyone with the link-can edit.” This way we DID NOT have to sign into our Google accounts today! The students added their name beside their class number and then we were ready to roll!
We then launched the CheckThis website. I gave each child a pair of homophones on a small strip of paper. Mrs. Goodman then walked them through how to create a “website” on the CheckThis site. The students started by adding a title (Homophones) and then a heading with their first name. Then they used the “poll” feature to type a sentence leaving a blank for their homophone. The two answer choices were the homophone pairs. They published the site and copied the link (super easy to do) on to the Google Doc. Students spent the reminder of the time “voting” on their peer’s homophone sentences. Students were encouraged to try and make their sentences difficult so they could stump their peers. Some of them were able to use the context clues to really figure out which homophone was needed to complete their sentence. Check out their sites below, use the link found in the Google Doc.
After we had given then a chance to vote on a majority of their peers sites we called them back to the carpet and Mrs. Goodman reviewed several of their sites whole group! Thanks again for having me into your classroom Mrs. Goodman!
