Mrs. W's Room

Before I became a "real" teacher, my perception of teaching English was that I would be blowing kids' minds with classic literature and handing out grammar worksheets.  Needless to say, that hasn't happened...yet. Instead, I was surprised to find that I loved teaching about writing. In particular, I found a love of teaching argumentation and persuasion. The seventh graders are gearing up for argumentative writing. We begin by talking about the concepts of perception and reality and how those two things influence our views of the world and all its issues. I have them make a poster that's based off a popular meme to help ground those concepts. It hardly seems like work, and it's one of the few assignments we do where I get to hear things like, "Can I finish this at home?" or "Can I do another one?" The task is to make a perception and reality poster. I start by showing them an example for a teacher, like this one . This makes for a great ...

Dear Middle Schooler, I see you on your hard days. I see that zit forming on the center of your face, looking at me like headlights set on high beams. I see those pants that have gotten just a little too short because you grew three inches overnight. I see that your best friend suddenly decided to ignore you for no apparent reason. I see that your parents are going through a divorce and you can’t possibly imagine how you will make it through the day, let alone first hour. I see you, and I know it’s hard. If you polled the entire universe (aliens and all), and asked them what age they wished they could go back to--not a single solitary soul would say twelve. Not. A. Single. One. Because being twelve is like getting a sweaty hug while being kicked in the shins. Being a middle schooler is like lying in the middle of the road and getting run over by a steamroller, and then being scraped off the road and put on the schoolbus because you still have to go to school (Flat Stanley s...

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 stran...

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...

We just wrapped up Genius Hour in my seventh grade English class, and there is much to say about that adventure. The Good Stuff Even if I felt like a failure most of the time, there were a lot of good things that came from Genius Hour.  Overall, the students said they loved being able to pick what they learned about. During Genius Hour, the majority of students were engaged in their project.  There were some really great presentations and reflections from my students. I had a few parents thank me for doing Genius Hour because it got their kid working on an interest outside of school. There was a good variety of projects and very few cookie cutter projects. Two students who were initially hesitant to do anything were able to get past their fear of failing and had unique projects. Halfway through the process, I started having students write down a goal at the beginning of Genius Hour and had them reflect on it at the end of class.  This help create a stronger...