Mrs. W's Room

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...

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...