A new crew of students arrived, full of energy and excitement for learning and ready to roll. And they kept rolling right up until 3:10 on Friday when they burst out of the school doors, still full of energy. How can we bottle that and sell it????
English Class: We brainstormed what the culture of 2014 is like in music, technology, television, etc., then what they thought they knew about 1965. It's the start of a PBL unit I designed to introduce the novel The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, which is set in 1965 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It also introduces research techniques. By the end of the week, they were ready to start finding out how correct they were about 1965 and first looked at online--which was when I found out how little they knew about doing effective keyword searches to find good information. That lesson couldn't wait, so we ended the week with it, and they picked up the skill quickly. They also seemed to find it very enjoyable, because who wouldn't want to know the best way to find exactly what they want on the Internet?
Core 2 actually began the book and had some homework assignments. We hit the brakes on Thursday because I could see we needed to hone in on what makes for a quality assignment, so as a class we brainstormed what they needed to do and what they needed from me. I then gave an opportunity to redo the assignments and turn them in Monday. I told them on Monday we'd be reboarding the bullet train and heading quickly down the track.
Among other things we did in the first week was learning new procedures, locating classes and signing up for I/E, and just settling in to being eighth graders. They got a book to read the first day and we managed to find a little time to actually read. I can tell these are students who won't need to be whipped to read--they beg for more time to do it! Yes!!
Encore: We jumped right back into their Google Drives, created a Doc, and I asked them to write about a collection they had or, if they didn't collect anything, some item that was valuable to them. I wanted to see where they were in writing, introduce the book we are going to read, Honus and Me, and also start their using Google Docs with me. I am able to ask them to share the document, then I can open all of them on my computer and watch their progress and make comments within the document to assist them. I discovered last year how much more that increases my ability to help them as they're writing.
Exploring Career Options (ECO) I'll be co-teaching this class with our school guidance counselor Andrea Zimmon. She was tied up the first day, so I took them through Virginia View's checklist of career interests, then asked them to start writing about other ideas they had for careers. On the second day, Mrs. Zimmon led a round table discussion to discover what they wanted from the class. It was exciting to hear all of their ideas and start to think about the possibilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment