Mrs. W's Room

Am I killing my students' love of reading?  I recently finished the book Readicide  by Kelly Gallagher and felt compelled to write about it.  I've been on a Gallagher kick this last year.  On one hand his ideas have changed my teaching for the better. On the other hand, his ideas make me question everything I do, sending me into an existential crisis. Okay, maybe not that far, but you get the idea. One thing in particular that struck a cord was Gallagher's harsh words about Accelerated Reader. I have struggled for a while to make sense of AR, but Readicide was the first logical argument I have heard against using it. In Gallagher's classroom, students are required to read one recreational book a month and complete a "one-pager", a short assignment that asks students about their books.  No points, no quizzes, no logs. There is less accountability and less reward with this approach, but Gallagher stands by it. Notably, he stressed that it is essential t

I started this post last week, and well...you know...got distracted!  Teachers never get distracted, right? I have my seventh graders involved in literature circles right now.  This  was the article that got me started on literature circles a few years ago. I got tired of kids nodding off when reading a novel, so I did something about it. It's one of those things that takes a lot of time to set up, explain, and model, but once the students get the hang of it, it's a magical thing.   I even heard one student say, "This is the first book that I really, actually  read in a long time." Hallelujah! They are all reading Esperanza Rising ,   but in the future, I would really like to try student-selected novels with literature circles.  One thing I'm still trying to get better at is gauging their comprehension throughout the process.   We are also plugging away on Genius Hour.  I'm learning a lot about how to improve it next year. Kourtney's experimenting w

We read a plethora of text types in 7th grade English from news articles, Greek myths, and poems.  I met with students one-on-one to talk about where they think their strengths and weakness were in the narratives they wrote. It is incredibly tricky to get students to revise their writing once they've decided they are “done”. Conferences sometimes help with that. They created covers for their narratives; now if I could just find the time to publish all of their stories in a book! Students used Google Draw to create a unique cover for their narratives. In Speech, we took a break from delivering speeches to analyze some famous speeches. The students did a great job selecting some modern and historically significant speeches. They looked at speeches by Emma Watson, Sir Ken Robinson, John F. Kennedy, Kevin Durant, and several more. We most recently started brainstorming ideas for the next speech--an informative speech. I tried a different approach when introducing this speech this

To celebrate the beginning of fall (or to mourn the end of summer), here is a lovely picture of a sunflower in my yard. Here’s what we were up to this week! The seventh graders continued their exploration on narratives this week.   We practiced summary writing and writing about theme.   We also talked about how setting can influence the events of a story.   We used close reading strategies using the Collections Close Reader .   To put all this practice together, my students have some interesting short stories of their own in the works.   I can’t wait to read them! I’m really kicking myself for not getting any pictures of the demonstration speeches we did in second hour this week.   I’ll leave it up to you to picture my students teaching the class how to make cheesecake, wash a dog, tie a bowtie, ride motorcycles, and make lava lamps.   It was a diverse set of topics to say the least. Friday, we relaxed a bit from the stress of speech delivering and had a Tongue Twister Battle.

This week was our first full, five day week...and oh boy, it was a  full week! :) Most of CHS at the Chris Herren assembly.  Really puts into perspective how small our school is! We were swept up in the short story "Rogue Wave" by Theodore Taylor in 7th grade this week.  It was a challenging story, but it had a great plot that kept us on the edges of our seats. We practiced writing summaries together and did some activities to help us identify multiple themes. Before we started reading the story, the 7th graders made their own vocabulary lists by scanning the story for unknown words. Then they put their lists on Quizlet so they could practice their words in a variety of ways. On Friday, students wrote their  Genuis Hour project proposals on our blog .  One of my fantastic students posting evidence from the text to support a theme. The summary my students helped write together. Deciding what evidence is relevant. Speech students led some interesting disc

Ah, Homecoming Week! Despite all of the chaos the week's activities brought, we had a fantastic week of learning in room 112. This week, I challenged the 7th graders to list 100 things they love , and wow, 7th graders love a lot of stuff! Once they got around two number 40ish, the real creativity kicked in. Of course I joined in on the excitement and wrote my own list.  We talked more about Genius Hour, and some students already started to worry about failing. We talked about the meaning of failure watched a few clips to help spark our conversation (" Audri's Rube Goldberg Monster Trap " and " Life=Risk ").  We also started our class blog, so we can write about our journey with Genius Hour this year. I can't wait to see the results! We used kidblog.org to set up our Genius Hour blogs. Some of my list of 100 Things I Love. We had an equally interesting week in Public Speaking. On Tuesday, students gave their first speeches. They were

In 7th grade English, we did some activities to help get students get acquainted with their new lives in junior high. On the first day, I challenged the students to work together.  We did this activity.  It was great to observe how each student approached the challenge and helped their team out.  My favorite part of class this week was talking about the Genius Hour project. I didn't have a much time to talk about it as I would have liked, but we were able to brainstorm a few ideas to think about over the weekend. Genius Hour brainstorming "Seventh Grade" activity Most of the students I have in Public Speaking had not previously had a class with me, so I think we got to know each other a little better this week.  We did a speaking and listening activity where one student had to describe a picture while the other student listened and tried to draw it. Students also worked in small groups to brainstorm all the different ways we communicate and wrote definitions of

Hey there! Ever since blogging became a thing in the late 1900s (that's around the year 1999 for you youngsters), I've been a part of it.  I started blogging my senior year in high school, but I defeated the purpose of a blog by making it private and no one could read it but me. That's where all my "emo poems" went that I like to tell my students about.  However, later in college, I kept a public blog regularly and had a small but loyal readership.  The best part of blogging is that now, whenever I feel like it, I can go back through the archives of my blogs and reminisce about the "good ol' days"(more like the emotional roller coaster days). Sadly, something happened when I became a teacher. I dropped blogging almost all together, save for a handful of posts over the years, and to be honest, I pretty much dropped writing anything that wasn't for school. What happened?  I certainly didn't lose my passion for writing!  Over the years, inst