Skip to main content

Week 4

This week students practiced a critical reading strategy.  I call it a think aloud.  Students read the text with a group and periodically stopped to make observations, predictions, summarize, ask questions, and point out literary devices.  It was amazing to listen to students as they did this. While reading "Through the Tunnel" they were able to go way beyond the literal meaning of the text and get at the deeper. symbolic meaning.  While reading "Charles" they were able to find numerous examples of foreshadowing which hinted at the story's
plot twist.



We also did a literary term mix and mingle.  You can ask your child about this, but it got everyone of his or her seat looking for examples of a variety of terms.







Comments

  1. hey this is a test :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. english is my favorite subject ever!

    ReplyDelete
  3. English is my favorite subject at school!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I love your class. English rocks. I enjoy watching your videos. I also love your class activities. P.S. My mom says hi.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have had a great time in english class this year! Looking forward to a great year.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I really enjoyed the two stories we have read so far. I like how we didn't just "read" them, we did think alouds and stations.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I think that the stories that we read were very fun to read. They kept me want to keep reading the story. I look forward to more great stories later this year.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TQE: Get students Engaged and Digging Deep

I've mentioned before how Twitter has helped me grow as an educator.  Edutwitter is a valuable resource for book recommendations, new teaching methods, lessons, and articles.  One of my favorite educators to follow is Marissa Thompson, a high school teacher at Carlsbad High. This summer I read about her TQE(thoughts, questions, epiphanies) method for discussing literature.  I'd always longed for having discussions like the ones I had in my college literature courses, but when I try fishbowl or Socratic seminar with my students, the discussions felt forced, flat, and awkward. That changed today when I tried TQE for the first time.  Sharing homework in small groups Students writing their TQEs on the board When I listened to Marissa's podcast on Cult of Pedagogy ( check it out here ), I was intimidated. After all, her students are in high school and have a rock star teacher.  I think I read the transcript twenty times before finally trying it....

Writing an Essay...with a Partner

I love technology for collaboration! Teaching writing to middle school students is not easy.  All students come with different skills and knowledge.  With 35 students in a class, it's impossible to sit down one on one and assist students with the writing process.  Teaching students to write a literary analysis is particularly challenging because most seventh-graders have little, to no experience.  Students need to learn to  develop a thesis statement, find evidence from the text to support it, provide the context of the selected quotations , and write insightful commentary on the evidence they selected. Remember, these kiddos are twelve! Graphic organizers are particularly helpful to these young writers. The biggest challenge is providing feedback to students as they are writing, rather than after they turn their work in for a grade.  Students need to be able to use the feedback they receive and see the difference it makes in the final product.  I...

Mock Trials-Periods 0 and 2

MY Ethan Couch (notice the shirt) Wow!  What a fantastic week it has been for me as a teacher!  My students have been working hard preparing for their assigned cases and getting ready to go to trial.  Each group was assigned a case based on an article we read in class.  One case was about a sixteen-year old  boy named Ethan Couch.  He had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit when the car he was driving hit a disabled vehicle and killed four innocent people.  He receive one year of rehabilitation in Malibu and ten years probabtion as his punishment. His attorneys blamed his behavior on what was called "affluenza."  Please ask your child about this word and how it was used to defend him in court! The other case involved for teens who threw an eight pound rock over an overpass and struck the passenger side of a vehicle.  The passenger was Sharon Budd, a middle-school English teacher and breast cancer survivor.  Sh...