Mrs. W's Room

My majestic judge's (graduation) robes waiting patriotically before the trial. Somewhere in the excitement of teaching, I almost failed to blog about one of my favorite things so far this year...the Debate and Mock Trial class. I am  kicking  myself for not getting more pictures of this class's adventures. We had a great trimester of debating, communicating, collaborating, arguing, researching, acting, and generally being awesome. During the second half of the trimester, we started working on a mock trial. We started by using a completely scripted trial to get a sense of the procedures, then jumped in to some essential vocabulary. The Idaho Law Foundation has great resources. We dug into their  Case Materials right away. As we prepped, we watched  this video of some Idaho schools competing. After a week or so of prep, we visited the courthouse where we talked to the judge, hung out with the bailiff, asked 1,000 questions, sat in the jury box, watched part of a jury t

I picked this book up in hopes of solving the problems of the universe. Or  to at least get students to read more, so they can figure out for themselves how awesome it is. In the book, Donalyn Miller describes how she implements reading instruction primarily through independent reading of student-selected novels. At the beginning of the year, she places a lot of focus on getting to know her students' interests and reading background. Then she utilizes both the school library and her own classroom library (which sounds like every teachers' dream) to match each student with several books that cater to those interests. Impressively, she challenges her students to read 40 books in one year. To help students meet this challenge, she carves out a lot of time during the school week to allow students to read. She also looks for ways to incorporate students' reading into standards based learning. She justifies her practices by sharing anecdotes from students and telli

For the last couple of weeks, the seventh graders have been working on spreading kindness throughout our school. I wrote this unit last year and made some improvements for this year.  It's a great way to teach content alongside a life skill that we all need to work on--kindness. For this unit, we start by watching some video clips about the importance of kindness as well as the scientific benefits of kindness ( Life Vest Inside  has a lot of really great free resources). Then we have some discussions about kindness, and by this point, most of the students are ready to act. So they get together in groups, and brainstorm ideas for something they could do to spread kindness at our school. I have them write a project proposal that gets feedback from other students and myself. We've mostly had projects where students leave positive notes in people's lockers or give compliments...all of which involve some form of candy kindness, too. :) Next year I need to figure out ways