Kindergarten Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect In Kindergarten

This week I had the opportunity to visit two of our kindergarten classrooms. Our focus was on cause and effect. We begin the lesson by defining cause and effect. Cause is "The reason something happened" and Effect is "What Happened." We also talked about how the cause can lead to different effects, they aren't going to be the same for every person!

We then used Google Slides to talk about cause and effects. The students were given the cause and had to figure out effects (the effects were covered up and removed) that may take place! The slide show is attached if you want to use it in your classroom! Here is a few of the slides:

After we concluded the slideshow, together we listened to the book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Students were prompted to listen as Peter makes many choices throughout the story and the effects that come after his choices. We listened through YouTube. The students then went back to their seats and we accessed Google Classroom which linked them to Google Slides. I "sniped" images from the YouTube video and gave them the cause on the left hand side of the slide. Students then had to figure out the effects. 

Here are some pictures and videos from the Lesson:

                            

Cause and Effect Slide Show

Peter Rabbit  YouTube 

Peter Rabbit Google Slide Template

Constructed Response Resources

Constructed Response

(used in 4th Grade Classes)

Over the past several weeks, we have used the Yes MA'AM format to continue our constructed response practice.

Our first article was off of Newsela: Are some "Fortnite" video gamers too young for it?" This article was put on Edulastic. We practiced the "hot text" feature that students will see on ILEARN and then moved on to the constructed response. For the constructed response I broke it down into 4 questions. For example, The first question asked the students to write the 1st sentence in a YES MA'AM by restating the question. The students moved through the rest of the YES MA'AM with similar directions. This allowed students to know exactly what we were looking for. I choose this method for this class because we still had several students wanting to write more than four sentences or were writing off topic or forgetting their sentence starter. 

Here is an example of what the question looked like:

Link to Edulastic Assignment: Fortnite 

The second article we used was from the 4th grade Instant Station Genre Studies. Each grade level has a copy of this book! The book contains paired text with questions at the end. The title of this article was: A Long Journey. The article talked about the Monarch's migration from Canada to Mexico in the fall. Students read the article using Edulastic and then wrote a constructed response. This time students were not given as much support. They were still provided with the frame work but had to come up with sentence starters on their own!

Here is what the question posed looked like:

Link to Edulastic Assignment: A Long Journey

Our third article was a fable pulled from the same resource as mentioned above. The title was: The Tale of Arachne. Again this resource provides questions and already has a constructed response question embedded. The students read the article on Edulastic and then typed their response. Students were provided with no support on the question, but still had resources hanging in the room to refer back to!

I loved the constructed response question:

Link to Edulastic Assignment: A Tale of Arachne

4th Grade Performance Task

4th Grade Performance Task

Over the past two weeks I had the opportunity to work with our 4th graders on the ILEARN performance task. I used Edulastic to create the performance task. The articles were pulled from Newsela and a Video was linked from YouTube to use as sources for the task. 

We completed the performance task over a two day period. We viewed the sources and answered the three questions leading up to the extended response on the first day. On the second day we tackled the extended response. 

The questions were worded just as our students will see them on ILEARN. We want them to feel prepared and confident going into the test with the wording they will see. 

Leading up to the extended response were two YES! MA'AM questions followed by a matching question (matching details to the sources they found them in). 

On the 2nd day we tackled the extended response. Our task was to write an informational article. We used Smekens Table Top Organizer to help us in this process. Obviously we can't give our students this on test day, but we can teach them to draw their "tabletops" on their scratch paper. 

 

Check out the Performance Task: 4th Grade Performance Task
Check out the Table Top PDF: Smekens Table Top Writing Organizer
I revised the original to fit 5 on a front/back copy:
Mrs. Stahl's Table Top PDF