Skip to main content

BSWP Begins

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).
From now until June, I'll be working my way through my ginormous to-do list. I am thrilled to be a Buzzwhooper!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Perception vs. Reality

Before I became a "real" teacher, my perception of teaching English was that I would be blowing kids' minds with classic literature and handing out grammar worksheets.  Needless to say, that hasn't happened...yet. Instead, I was surprised to find that I loved teaching about writing. In particular, I found a love of teaching argumentation and persuasion. The seventh graders are gearing up for argumentative writing. We begin by talking about the concepts of perception and reality and how those two things influence our views of the world and all its issues. I have them make a poster that's based off a popular meme to help ground those concepts. It hardly seems like work, and it's one of the few assignments we do where I get to hear things like, "Can I finish this at home?" or "Can I do another one?" The task is to make a perception and reality poster. I start by showing them an example for a teacher, like this one . This makes for a great ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tongue Twisters, Growth Mindset, and Self-Portraits

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 deli...
Post a Comment
Read more

Killer Waves, Students Teach, and We Believe

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. Sp...
Post a Comment
Read more