Stars, Modest Proposals, and Infographics

I'm going back to my original format this week with a snapshot of what we've been doing in each class lately. This Friday and Saturday, I head to the Pre-Institute for the Boise State Writing Project, and I'm excited to write about that adventure in the future, as well.

Students complete a star for each book they read.
At the beginning of the year, I challenged students to make it around the room. We are almost there!

8th English: As I mentioned in my last post, the eighth grade class is in the midst of researching a career they are interested in pursuing. We have a very scaffolded process for making this happen. The process is broken up into tasks that allow students to think and write about the process of research along the way. We looked at several mentor texts and made an "I like" list. We practiced evaluating websites using the C.A.R.S. acronym. We practiced summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. This Friday, when I am gone, Mr. Nilsen had them analyze the structure of the mentor texts by having students line them up with the outline they will use. How awesome is it knowing that your students will still get a quality lesson when you are not even there? This unit has become pretty awesome, and Mr. Nilsen has brought a lot of fresh ideas to it.

"I like" list we wrote after reading mentor texts.

Checklist that shows the process.

12th English: The seniors just finished a unit of study on argumentative writing and satire. We analyzed protest songs, read Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, and Swift's "A Modest Proposal".  We read some articles and watched a video clip from The Onion. I used a satirical essay I wrote as a mentor text, and then had them imitate Swift's structure by writing their own satirical essays. Last year, I had them research their topics prior to writing, and I skipped that this year because I felt pressed for time. That was a bad idea. This is my second year teaching seniors, and it never fails to perplex me how tricky it is to motivate and teach older students. I have a lot of room for reflection and improvement here. This week, after all the scholarship interviews, track meets, and field trips clear, we will be starting the PBL I planned which will involve collecting oral histories from community members. I'm really excited to do this project, and I hope I can transfer some of that enthusiasm to them.

Adolfo's satirical solution to rising healthcare costs.

From Kennedy's protest song analysis.

Research Writing: In this class, we are in the middle of writing our first of two research papers.  Having a whole class dedicated to this allows us to slow the process down, teach the basics, and really give students time to read and absorb their sources. So far, the students have produced a topic proposal, an annotated bibliography, notes, and an outline. Along with a paper, students will also have a hands-on component and will present their findings to the class. I wrestled last year with what to do with this class to make it more interesting and valuable for students. I made a few tweaks, and it still didn't really help. At the end of the day, a class where you write research papers is only going to have so much appeal to students. Maybe that's okay to a certain degree? I don't know, but I'm working on some ways to improve the second half of our trimester.

Infographic we made using information about each other.

Annotated bibliography entry...I know...exciting! :)

Mythology: If it weren't for Zachary Hamby, my mythology class would be a disaster. He is a teacher who created mythologyteacher.com.  He has also published several books about mythology that were made with students in mind. With his reader's theater approach to the myths, combined with short clips from cheesy mythology movies, episodes of Mythic Warriors, Bernard Evslin's book, and these materials (which I most recently discovered are possibly partially plagiarized), I have been able to build a pretty solid curriculum for this class. We began the trimester by studying different creation stories. Then we dug into Greek mythology, and in the next couple weeks, we will start Norse mythology, which is my favorite.  Next year will be a rotation year, and I will need to pull in some new mythologies, so students can take it again.

The poster Chris made for Gabby's mythological character.

Our Greek mythology family tree, with its strange twists and turns.