Question 1: How does the Genius Ladder benefit the writing
process?
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child
into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.” Aldous Huxley
The Genius Ladder benefits the
writing process by making writing simple, giving lots of practice with Oral
Writing, and MOST IMPORTANTLY weaving the GOLDEN THREAD of FUN into your daily
instruction. Writing isn’t only
difficult for our students, we as teachers struggle while teaching this COMPLEX
content area. When students get lots of practice they gain more confidence. Any
time you engage students limbic systems by weaving the GOLDEN THREAD of FUN,
you AND your students win big time!
Writing is a difficult subject for
students and teachers. Students struggle with writing because there are so many
BORING, complicated rules to learn. Thanks to Whole Brain Teaching’s HUGE
collection of writing instruction tools, writing is no longer boring or complicated.
Choose from a number of resources under the ebooks section of the Whole Brain
Teaching Website. Genius Ladder is only one of many. There is even an
interactive PDF presentation for the Genius Ladder created by Chris Rekstad, a
co-founder of Whole Brain Teaching. Whole Brain Teaching helps teachers
simplify writing instruction with Super Speed Grammar, The Writing Game, Genius
Ladder, RedGreen Marker Editing and much more.
Students beg to play the Genius
Ladder. That’s right… students are BEGGING to practice grammar and writing.
They LOVE creating silly sentences. Laughter erupts as the class works to
change a BLAH sentence into a GENIUS paragraph. As the students participate in
this beautifully simple, yet enriching game they not only learn about parts of
speech they increase their vocabulary. They race against the clock to replace
the noun, verb, or adjective in the provided sentences as many times as
possible.
Weaving the GOLDEN THREAD of FUN,
is a necessity in ANY classroom. If you aren’t weaving the GOLDEN THREAD of FUN…
you aren't in a Whole Brain Classroom. The quote at the beginning of my post makes
an incredible point. Teachers are so bogged down with all the rules and
expectations of data, common core, testing,… that we lose our enthusiasm. We
can’t lose our enthusiasm … we have to lead our students to be genius’.
For more examples of the Genius
Ladder, watch program 504 on the Whole Brain Teaching Website. You can also
watch Chris Biffle (aka Coach B), cofounder of Whole Brain Teaching play the
Genius Ladder in this video found on youtube (http://goo.gl/hZWdO)
. Also, watch the AMAZING Jasselle Cruz,
fifth grade teacher, lead her students in an action packed Genius Ladder lesson
complete with disguise cream (http://goo.gl/JiY8O) .
