The Great Debate, Pen Pals, and Analytical Poets

My eighth grade class recently asked me about my blog. Then, the memories of determination, reflection, and improvement came flooding back to me. Thank goodness for accountability, right?

Since my last post, we've entered second trimester, so I have new class and new faces! Here's the latest.

Seventh graders are involved in a poetry unit right now. For their assessment, they are writing a poem, and then writing a literary analysis about the techniques they used in their poems. Should be interesting! I stole the idea from here. Literary analysis is tricky...especially when figurative language is involved. I found this approach to approaching analysis helpful. Sarah Wessling breaks down analysis into three steps: making observations, finding patterns, and drawing conclusions. It's that final step that gives students the most grief, so we've been practicing a lot. 

An activity we did to show the different between a figurative meaning and a literal meaning.

I have a new section of Public Speaking this trimester. It's a small class of four, so I decided to invite other students and staff members to watch on speech days. We had our first speech right before winter break. It was great to have a full room, and I think it helped raise the bar for the speeches that were delivered. It may have made them more nervous, but in the end we saw fantastic demonstration speeches on how to do card tricks, shoe a horse, pot a plant, and change a tire. Now, we are in the middle of prepping informative speeches. This time around, I hope to be more specific about creating visual aids.

For the first time this school year, I have the eighth graders. This is the first time that I've had a class a second time around. It's fascinating to see the effects of your influence on students (the good, the bad, and the ugly). Teachers don't usually get the chance to see that influence when they ship their students off to the next grade level or school. That's one of the reasons I was really excited to be a part of this school...to see kids progress through the grades and see the long term results of learning. The eighth graders are off to a good start. We are wrapping up a unit on culture and belonging that also included pen pal letters. We will continue writing the letters this trimester and hopefully meet our pen pals sometime this spring. I've never seen kids so excited to write.  I also may have cried just a little bit when they got their first letters.

I decided to offer a Debate and Mock Trial class this year. It has been fantastic! We started the trimester learning the debate basics by using a modified policy debate format. The WRHS debate coach and team have been a tremendous help. They even traveled to our neck of the woods to do a debate demonstration and answer the one million questions we have about debate and tournaments. We will do one more unit with Lincoln-Douglas debate, and then we will venture into mock trial territory. I am learning a great deal along the way about how to improve my teaching in other classes when it comes to argument, public speaking, and research.  This bunch of students has been enthusiastically awesome about trying something new and challenging.

Practicing for a debate.

During the break, I finally put something on my bulletin board (stolen from Pinterest, of course).  I still need to add the words "Change your words, change your mindset", but I like it!