Mrs. W's Room

"Failure to attend to children's moral and social development will lead neither to happiness nor to economic security." - Peter H. Johnston Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives,  by Peter H. Johnston, asserts that words have significant power in the lives of students. The ideas and research presented in his book echo many of the same themes in my other readings this year, but Johnston's book adds depth and context. Throughout the book, he explains that teachers need to be deliberate in the words they use to engage and motivate students. In turn, students need deliberate opportunities to rehearse using the power of their own words. He begins by explaining the impact of fixed- performance and dynamic-learning frames through Dweck and others' research. I was reminded of Dweck's "power of yet" TED Talk. To encourage dynamic-learning frames, Johnston encourages positive language over praise and process feedback rather than personal. J

We started our week with a short clip that I hoped would further express the importance of meaningful conversations. The students also got into groups and wrote a group contract, assigned tasks, and began the process of selecting and scheduling an interview. I was surprised by how quickly most groups scheduled their interviews. There are some students who are definitely ready to hit the ground running with this project. Mr. Mecham visited on Tuesday. From him, we got excellent tips for collecting an oral history. He also shared actual examples from the times he's sat down do collect stories from community members. He brought an expertise that I would have not been able to provide these students. We did a jigsaw reading of The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide, then each group presented on the section they read. Then we did a quickwrite to take some time to reflect on what we had discovered so far in this process. We also tal

I attended the Boise State Writing Project Pre-Institute this weekend and have a painfully full brain and plate now. The crazy part is, that even though I feel overwhelmed, nervous, and confused, I am also incredibly excited to start. I already feel like a world of teacher connections has been opened to me. Everyone was incredibly warm, enthusiastic, and supportive. When I first started teaching, the switch for my love of reading and writing got turned off and the work of teaching absorbed it. In the last few years, I've started to realize that there is enough room for both professional and personal reading and writing in my life, and by doing both, I am hopefully becoming a better teacher for my students. During the Pre-Institute, we began reflecting on our teaching principles and practices. I feel like the BSWP will help me better define and strengthen those principles and practices by pushing me out of my comfort zone (much like I expect my students to do each day).

The Legacy Project has launched! The idea for this project started as a wondering last year. As in, I kept wondering if Carey had a museum or a collected history and wondered if the students could have a role in developing and maintaining that history. Last year, Wow Students representatives came and talked to us about their awesomeness (find out more about them  here ). This fall we got the opportunity to take classes on Project Based Learning, so I was able to have some time to develop the idea further, get feedback, and start gathering resources. From there the idea developed into a 12th grade English, oral history project to be presented to community members and displayed on their graduation night--a sort of gift to the community. Then everything started to fall in place. Wow Students put me in contact with Mary Tyson at the Community Library in Ketchum. After meeting with her, I had a much better idea of the scope of the project, and she gave me some great resources and adv

I'm going back to my original format this week with a snapshot of what we've been doing in each class lately. This Friday and Saturday, I head to the Pre-Institute for the Boise State Writing Project, and I'm excited to write about that adventure in the future, as well. Students complete a star for each book they read. At the beginning of the year, I challenged students to make it around the room. We are almost there! 8th English: As I mentioned in my last post, the eighth grade class is in the midst of researching a career they are interested in pursuing. We have a very scaffolded process for making this happen. The process is broken up into tasks that allow students to think and write about the process of research along the way. We looked at several mentor texts and made an "I like" list. We practiced evaluating websites using the C.A.R.S . acronym. We practiced summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. This Friday, when I am gone, Mr. Nilsen had the

My eighth grade class noticed that I have not written much about them on my blog, and demanded that I remedy it with a post just about them. I also need to step up my blogging game if I'm going to make my 25 blog challenge by May. So here we go! These guys and gals have kept me on my toes, and we have had an amazingly productive and exciting year.  We started second trimester off with pen pal letters, which we are continuing through the end of the year. We read The Diary of Anne Frank , the play, and created some Google Draw posters to apply character analysis. Click to see an example. We read some scary stories, like "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Monkey's Paw". The students wrote a psychological profile for the character in "Tell Tale" using text-based evidence. Then we wrote shared scary stories where the students wrote a line, then switched notebooks with a table partner and kept adding sentences. That resulted in some creative and stran