I recently started teaching the novel "Speak" with my honors freshman classes. They love it! One of the things that I wanted them to focus on when they are text marking their books ( they annotate in all of their novels) are the motifs the author uses. Below is a visual I made to remind my students what they should be looking for as they read. The images are supposed to be a mirror, seeds, trees, and lips/mouths. Feel free to steal this idea to help your kiddies!
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I wanted to do something to help those on the east coast affected by Sandy. I also decided, why not ask the 130 people I see everyday if they would like to help to. I stumbled upon this article and found an address collecting supplies for school and students in need. I decided to let my kids choose to bring in supplies or do their homework for points on Monday and Tuesday of this week. I do not believe in letting students "buy" a grade by bringing in supplies, which is why my kids could bring something in, or do thier work. There was no extra crdit given for simply bringing in supplies. Here is a link to the article I read with an address to send school supplies to. I hope we can all help to make a difference for those in need! http://wordontheshore.com/school-supplies-for-hurricane-sandy-victims-cms-1779 These days our students spend hours on the internet. They have been trained to connect best with visuals. Funny images and humourous pictures are getting the top hits from kids on websites like tumblr and facebook and other social sites. Why not use this need for funny graphics to reel our students into lessons? Below are some of my favorite images that I plan to use throughout the year as attention getters and hooks for different lessons. Steal away and lets work together to get kids engaged! I LOVE the show this image is from: Ned's declassified school survival guide. So funny, and students should recognize it! What an interesting way to give kids the old "choose your partner wisely" speech. Let the image speak for you. I used this saying to get my juniors ready for ACT grammar. Grammar is not always interesting, but if you use a little hummor, the kids can put up with it for a class period, and learns some comma rules right off the bat! Hamlet humor. Gotta love it. OBVIOUSLY CANNOT SHOW THIS. But it speaks the truth. Again, advice about picking group members. Teaching credible sources with the (in)credible Hulk! He just looks so cute in glasses :) This one is for the science teachers out there. What a fun way to review famous scienetists and the discoveries/theories they are known for! And finally, an abreviated way to introduce both sides of a discussion for Romeo and Juliet in a formate kids are used to: facebook. Is the play really about love? Do the ends justify the means? Were they really in love?
Comment and let me know what images worked in your classroom, or if you have any creative ways to use what our students are seeing online to engage them in the classroom! I currently teach freshmen, and getting these students to plan for tomorrow, let alone in four years in a fight all on its own. However, I wanted to get my students thinking about their futures, and possibilities they might have, or not have, depending on their action throughout high school.
I decided, instead of giving them the patented lecture the guidance office gives each year to get creative and give kids a visual. All I did in class was ask them to fill out a goal sheet about where they think they want to be in 4 years, and then I directed them to my college display. I said "look at this, explore it, ask me questions, or ignore it, but there is an abundance of information right in this room to help you plan for the future. Take it or leave it". And I have had a lot of students take! Its amazing what a simple display that I didn't give any lengthy explanation about has inspired! Kids have asked me about specific colleges, and when I ask if they want me to look up more information they have wanted it and have read it! I have helped my sophomore students think about tests they might want to take, have kids asking me to help them prepare for the ACT and generally have kids thinking about their futures. Granted, its not all my students, and maybe these kids were already planning for the future, but its great to see students taking action and considering different paths they might be able to take after high school. I've posted picture below of my display ( its currently still a work in progress!) The letters say "Panthers Can Go Far" and I have different headings for different kinds of schools. I simply asked my guidance office for any extra or old pamphlets from schools they didn't want and cut them up for my board. My sister is also currently a senior in high school, so I took a lot of the college mail that she had already looked at, or didn't need anymore. I looked up information about needs-blind admissions and full-need admissions here. Here is a list of schools that offer full tuition and full rides based on act scores. Scroll down to where it says "Bob Wallace" and he has created a comprehensive list by state for these types of schools. I'm just so excited to be able to give my kids this information, and for them to get it from a familiar face. Sometimes it can be intimidating to go into a guidance office and ask a staff member you don't really know about information. Hopefully, I can inspire my kids to start with me, and then work their way to the college experts in the office. I'm super proud of my new TKAM board! I accredit my sorority for making me talented at decorating walls... I wanted to get students excited to read this novel by linking it to other novels they might have enjoyed. AND I gave them a cheat sheet right on the wall for themes for this books. Plus it just looks so darn cute! The books I listed were: Hunger Games series, The Kite Runner, Monster, The Glass Castle, Night, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, There Are No Children Here, The Book Thief, The Outsiders, A Time To Kill, The Help, My Forbidden Face, The Secret Life of Bees, The Giver, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I love teaching Suzan Collins’ The Hunger Games. It was literally my
dream unit when I was in undergrad, and I am so blessed that I got to teach it to two of my classes my first year teaching. This book is a story that everyone should read. Not only is it entertaining and makes kids excited about reading, but it is smart! I think I could create a whole college course on the social commentary that Collins brings to the table in this dystopian tale. However, since social commentary is a bit over my struggling reader’s heads, ( I teach the H.Games to my reading fundamentals classes) I came up with a few lessons to bring it to there level, and slowly introduced the more complex aspects of this novel. One of my kid’s favorite activities that we did with The Hunger Games, was keep track of the death toll of the tributes during the games. As we read chapter by chapter, Katniss lets the reader know which tributes are killed. I made a district line up with little boy and girl tribute figure below each district, and when someone is killed, we cross them off with a big red ex. Students begged to be the ones to keep our death list up to date. This may seem a little morbid, but it was a great tool to help my readers visualize which characters were left, and it gave them a concrete look at the magnitude of exactly how many children were dying in this book. (that’s the whole point of the book! ) It’s easy to read in the first chapter of the games that 11 tributes are dead. But when you physically cross them off a list one by one, it really hits home. The extent of the brutality of the Capitol, and of these Games, is revealed in front of your student’s eyes. It’s also a great way to keep track of the plot. I had students record which chapters tributes died in so we could easily find key parts of the story when discussing. Overall this was a great tool and an exciting way to get kids involved with the story. I have pictures attached of our District line up. I used the district crests from the Hunger Games movie site and simply drew blue and pink stick figures under each crest to signify the boy and girl tribute from each district. As we learned character’s names the class added those as well. Here is a board I had up in my classroom when we were studying "The Freedom Writers DIary". We had a discussion of steryotypes, and each student created a "brick" with a name or steryotype they have been called. They got really into it! In fact, many students asked if they could make more than one brick.
A Big Thought (Bubble) It's easy to get wrapped up in what you are teaching and what skills you want your students to learn. I made this mistake recently, and it wasn't until I asked my students to reflect and write down their own opinions on a video we recently watched, and I realized I needed to make their voices heard even more within my classroom. This realization was even more clear as I read my students reflections. The callus jokes they throw around in class made me a little doubtful of their ability to understand the suffering and unjust treatment of African Americans before and during the civil rights movement. Boy was I proven wrong! Out loud, my kids pretended to not care, but on paper they delivered eloquent, insightful, and honest reactions and opinions. These thoughts were too amazing for just my eyes to see. This is where the Big Thought Bubble idea was born. Why not let students responses be showcased for the whole class to see? I created a huge thought bubble, picked a variety of responses, typed them, made them look pretty, and displayed them right smack dab in the middle of my classroom. I made sure to pick responses that reflected many different opinions and ideas, not just the ones I agreed with. Students walked in the next day and asked who these quotes were from. I replied "you did!" Each class spent a good 5 minutes reading all quotes and trying to see if something they had written was on the board. I plan on adding new thoughts and updating as we move forward within our unit. Overall this is a simple way to recognize student's work and to let kids see what their peers are thinking. |
Author Nerdy 9th grade English teacher who loves books and teaching. |