Leap Year 2024 | Leap Day Activity | Do We Need Leap Year Socratic Seminar: In this Mini Socratic Seminar and Lesson students will mark the text of an article about Leap Year and why we have them. Then they will have a Socratic Seminar in small groups in order to discuss the essential question, “What is a leap year and is it a necessity?”

By the end of this Socratic Seminar, your students will have a deep understanding of what a Leap Year is and how to mark a text to prepare for a successful Socratic Seminar. Use this AVID Mini Socratic Seminar Lesson to increase dialogue and engagement in your classroom!

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What's Included:

• Lesson Plan with a walkthrough of all the slides and a video overview and explanation.
• What is a Leap Year Article- google doc which includes a transcript for students to mark their text and come up with questions in the margins for the Seminar. They will also add an essential question at the top, asummary at the bottom, and fill out the embedded vocabulary chart.
• Google slides- go over the lesson and discuss the process of a Socratic Seminar. The slides include embedded links for students to follow along and access required documents.
• Participant Reflection- a digital Google Sheets document for students to summarize and reflect what they learned through the Seminar.

Directions:

• Students will discuss prior knowledge they share about leap years
• Students will read the provided article and follow directions in the slides to mark the text
• Students will highlight unknown words and add these words and their definitions to their embedded vocabulary chart in the article text
• Students will come up with questions for the Socratic Seminar using Costa's Level of Thinking.
• Students will meet with a partner to clarify any confusion.
• Students will summarize the text by answering the EQ in 3-5 sentences.
• Students will review the protocol for Socratic Seminars.
• Students will use their questions and provided sentence stems to have dialogue in the Seminar.
• Students will complete a participant checklist to reflect on the seminar.

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