MR. GILMAN'S CLASS PAGE

Mr. GILMAN'S USEFUL MATERIALS AND LINKS

My personal goal is to prepare all my students for success in the world school.  Each student will travel through life according to his/her own individual plan, but will not be able to succeed unless capable of acquiring and understanding a vast amount of information and communicating thoughts and ideas clearly and accurately.  To that purpose, as well as my students' continued success, all my courses emphasize good reading comprehension and written and oral communication skills, not to mention the social sciences. 

Key Component of Mr. Gilman's Reading Instruction.  View this link to  get a comprehensive view of what Mr. Gilman is working on in order to improve his students' reading abilities.  Reading skills can be broken down into a number of components, each which can be taught/studied in order to improve the reading ability that will lead to improved reading comprehension.  Reading comprehension = learning.  Teaching students to learn from their own reading is an empowering act designed to create independent, self-learners with the hope that they will become life-long learners. 

Cornell (two-column) note taking.  Cornell (two-column) note-taking is required for all vocabulary assignments.  It is also a good method of taking notes from lectures or readings.  The example you will see is in Cornell layout so you have an example to see.  Study tips are included. 

Outline note taking.  Outlining is a more complex form of note taking which lends itself toward the organizing and recording of information from expository writing, which happens to be the most common form of writing used in social studies, especially history.  It is the required means of note taking from reading assignments. 

SQ3R. SQ3R is a reading specific comprehension strategy that is especially effective for expository writing, which is the predominant form of writing, and therefore reading, to be found in social studies, especially history. 

Graphic Organizers are a useful means of organizing information and showing relationships.  An alternative means of presenting information that appeals to the "multiple" learning styles of students who might be more "spatial" or "visual" than "linguistic."  The creation of graphic organizers is sometimes used as an alternative assessment in Mr. Gilman's classes.  There is a wide variety of graphic organizers to choose from.  A couple of the more common ones used by Mr. Gilman can be found in his reading guide.

Writing Guide for Social Studies  Of the four basic types of writing, expository writing is the most common found in social studies.  Persuasive is perhaps the second most useful form, especially for those students that join the Model United Nations organization.  Some helpful hints can be found in this writing guide along with some helpful graphic organizers. 

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