Here is a great way to do the weekend chat that involves kinesthetic, personal, comprehensible, and compelling input.
I posted a long time ago about the Weekend Chat. Every Monday, we take time to talk about our weekends and on Fridays we talk about what we will be doing during the weekend. I have done the weekend chat for a long time with good success but a couple weeks ago I saw on Facebook a great new way to do it. Christy Lade posted how she does it in her classroom and I instantly took her idea and used it in class and it was one of the greatest things that we have ever done. Simply amazing! With her permission, here is how she does it.
After doing Kristy’s weekend chat, I tweeted about it. My tweet was seen over 9,000 times and had great reaction. I had people tweet with comments such as “it is a game changer”, “what a cool idea”, “Love it! going to try this.” Some also asked how it works and to explain it.
Nice way to do the weekend chat today, thanks to Christy Lade for the great idea pic.twitter.com/wWUhSWJWgz
— Dustin Williamson (@williamson_ci) October 1, 2018
So here is how it works:
- First, print out prompts of things that students might have done over the weekend. Here is Christy’s document. Cut them out and post them on the board.
- Students will read each activity and write their name under the activities that they did over the weekend. Do what you need to do to make sure that they are all comprehensible.
- Then discuss what they did over the weekend based on the names under each activity. The teacher leads a CI conversation. You can ask for more details and take the conversation as far as you can.
- You can finish with a write and discuss activity. (Use the writing as a reading for the next class)
There was rich input and super engagement. What I love the most about this weekend chat upgrade is that the possibilities of extended readings and compelling input are infinite. My students really enjoyed this and I am excited to keep doing it. This activity can be done at all levels and before or after the weekend.
This idea also came from Jon Cowart and Julie Ogden Thompson.
Williamson CI & TPRS 
[…] people have been sharing this weekend chat idea, and Dustin has written a nice summary about […]
I have just discovered your blog. What a treasure trove of ideas!! I love this post on Weekend Chat. I am currently looking at ideas for next year, and this certainly seems like one I will want to add in fairly regularly. I am curious about how you do your write and discuss. Do you limit your chat to a few students each time? If you chat with several students, how do the students in your class track all the information shared for the Write and Discuss activity? Thanks
I am not the best at Write and Discuss as I don’t do it as often as I should. It usually is focused on a few students each time or focused on a couple activities each time. If the discussion spreads to more students then I happily include them in the writing. I have a student type the writing on a Google doc as we discuss and I save all of the writings. If I didn’t have a student record what we talk about I definitely wouldn’t be able to track all of the information!