Scary Stories, Growing Up, and Co-Teaching Adventures

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 strange stories that we read by iPhone light, in the dark, at 9:00 am in the morning.

Shared story that I cut off before it gets too scary. You're welcome.

We have most recently been pondering about the what it means to grow up and be an adult.  We practiced finding claims and evidence in informative texts and had a four-corners debate. This time, I added the requirement that each student needed to contribute at least once during the debate. That was a simple tweak that made a big difference to the quality of the conversations.

Four-corners debate in action.

Now we are in the thick of writing a research paper about careers using the I-Search method. We've also had Mr. Nilsen in the classroom Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays because we are trying out co-teaching. So far, it's a huge benefit to the classroom. I find that it makes me more intentional about my teaching, it makes the classroom environment incredibly positive, and having his expertise in the room gives students amazing support. We just need to figure out the planning time side of co-teacher. Hopefully, it becomes a more common occurrence in our school in the years to come.

I am thrilled to finish out the year with these stellar eight grade stars and learn more from co-teaching!