Mrs. W's Room

The last few weeks with the seniors have been a busy blur. They spent last week preparing their presentations, and we all generally freaked out at how quickly this day arrived. I wish I had them for at least another week, but alas, they would like to graduate and move on with their lives. During the final week of the project, we had some issues figuring out audio compatibility, and I realized that, although Chromebooks are extremely handy, we can't do everything on them. Technology, in general, was a source of frustration, but I definitely know how to fix these issues next year. We also learned that transcribing oral history, or transcribing anything for that matter, is harder than it seems. Do you type what they've said verbatim? Do you leave out the laughter? The uhs?  Mary Tyson at the Community Library sent some guides that helped clear up those questions.  I realize now that transcribing takes a long time. One group's transcription is nearly 30 pages in len...

A student recently asked me why I decided to do my blog challenge, and I answered by saying I wanted to challenge myself to do what I ask my students to do. Then, he followed up with another question: “What do you get when you write all 25?” That question is a little tougher to answer. Below,  are the lessons I picked up, and also how those lessons can be transferred to teaching writing. Beware....it's a long post.

If a picture can sum up a life, I think the picture below does a sufficient job. In my sassy floral pants and my hair curled by these burn-inducing nightmares , I am proudly displaying my Principal's Award upside down. Story. Of. My. Life. This photo has been a huge source of family entertainment for years, but I want to know why the person taking my picture didn't notice this, or maybe they did, and they decided to let it happen for posterity. Anyways, the reason I thought of this picture was because the year's end is nigh (too much Hamlet ). I've been thinking about the ways we celebrate student success as a school and in our classrooms. There are athletic and academic award ceremonies, field trips, dances, class parties, graduations, and more. I love it all. I love how we look back at the end with a sentimentality that doesn't exist at the beginning. I love to see kids get recognized for greatness. I can't continue without saying that if you've n...

After this year, I've realized that my Mythology class needs some more work. For one thing, I spent way too much time on Greek mythology. I also failed to remember how many times the class got interrupted last year by testing, track, drama, etc...all that along with the fact that it is already difficult to keep students rolling the last few months of school. Because I didn't remember that, I ended up frustrated by the same interruptions and things took much longer than needed.  For next year, I think I'll work on developing smaller units of study based around themes (love, war, pride, etc.) with more project-based activities. I also need to find more visual media to interweave with the plays and short stories we read (which is tricky since mythology is scandalous enough on paper), although I did integrate more art this year. There also needs to be more cultural/historical context included with the mythologies that we study. For instance, I think there are benefits to...

Teaching seniors is hard. Teaching seniors during the last month before graduation and attempting to instill some kind of appreciation and enthusiasm for Hamlet is reckless behavior. Yet, that's exactly what I am doing. Kelly Gallagher describes it best: "I have done many difficult things in my life. I have run a marathon. I have eaten escargot to impress a date. I have sat in the middle seat of a cross-country flight, wedged between a snorer and a person in desperate need of Gas-X. Worse, I have sat through an episode of  Sex and the City. But all of these pale in comparison to the hardest thing I have ever done: stand in front of thirty-seven teenagers with the expressed purpose of teaching Hamlet. "  He defends this seemingly impossible task by saying that if we help students see the reward of the hard work it takes to tackle a complex text, they will surprise you and work hard. I'm not sure how successful I've been at doing that this year. I'm trying, b...

One of these days, in my free time, I'd love to track down some of my most influential teachers and thank them. Until then, I'd like to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week by taking some time to thank some of my teachers for some important lessons they taught. They are sort of in chronological order, and there are probably 20 more teachers I could thank. After writing these, I think it's amazing how much these teachers show up in the work I do now--their strategies, personalities, and styles sometimes creep into my own. I try to remember how their words impacted the way I defined myself whenever I'm talking to my own students (although I could definitely get better at this).  What would you thank your teachers for? Mrs. Campbell: Thank you for not ratting me out that time I lied about having a retainer (which was actually just a paperclip) after it fell out on the playground. Mrs. Hugues: Thank you for putting my earrings back in, and thank you for not putting ...

"Failure to attend to children's moral and social development will lead neither to happiness nor to economic security." - Peter H. Johnston Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives,  by Peter H. Johnston, asserts that words have significant power in the lives of students. The ideas and research presented in his book echo many of the same themes in my other readings this year, but Johnston's book adds depth and context. Throughout the book, he explains that teachers need to be deliberate in the words they use to engage and motivate students. In turn, students need deliberate opportunities to rehearse using the power of their own words. He begins by explaining the impact of fixed- performance and dynamic-learning frames through Dweck and others' research. I was reminded of Dweck's "power of yet" TED Talk. To encourage dynamic-learning frames, Johnston encourages positive language over praise and process feedback rather than personal. J...

We started our week with a short clip that I hoped would further express the importance of meaningful conversations. The students also got into groups and wrote a group contract, assigned tasks, and began the process of selecting and scheduling an interview. I was surprised by how quickly most groups scheduled their interviews. There are some students who are definitely ready to hit the ground running with this project. Mr. Mecham visited on Tuesday. From him, we got excellent tips for collecting an oral history. He also shared actual examples from the times he's sat down do collect stories from community members. He brought an expertise that I would have not been able to provide these students. We did a jigsaw reading of The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide, then each group presented on the section they read. Then we did a quickwrite to take some time to reflect on what we had discovered so far in this process. We also tal...

I attended the Boise State Writing Project Pre-Institute this weekend and have a painfully full brain and plate now. The crazy part is, that even though I feel overwhelmed, nervous, and confused, I am also incredibly excited to start. I already feel like a world of teacher connections has been opened to me. Everyone was incredibly warm, enthusiastic, and supportive. When I first started teaching, the switch for my love of reading and writing got turned off and the work of teaching absorbed it. In the last few years, I've started to realize that there is enough room for both professional and personal reading and writing in my life, and by doing both, I am hopefully becoming a better teacher for my students. During the Pre-Institute, we began reflecting on our teaching principles and practices. I feel like the BSWP will help me better define and strengthen those principles and practices by pushing me out of my comfort zone (much like I expect my students to do each day). ...

The Legacy Project has launched! The idea for this project started as a wondering last year. As in, I kept wondering if Carey had a museum or a collected history and wondered if the students could have a role in developing and maintaining that history. Last year, Wow Students representatives came and talked to us about their awesomeness (find out more about them  here ). This fall we got the opportunity to take classes on Project Based Learning, so I was able to have some time to develop the idea further, get feedback, and start gathering resources. From there the idea developed into a 12th grade English, oral history project to be presented to community members and displayed on their graduation night--a sort of gift to the community. Then everything started to fall in place. Wow Students put me in contact with Mary Tyson at the Community Library in Ketchum. After meeting with her, I had a much better idea of the scope of the project, and she gave me some great resources and...

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 the...

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...

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 ...

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...