Skip to main content

It's March!



English 7 Honors finished Tom Sawyer this week!  I think most of the kids enjoyed it, even though many found it challenging.  I really wanted my students to experience the humor of Twain and the joy of reading a classic!  This week English 7H  will be working on a performance task.  It will prepare the students for what they will see on the state test in May.   Students will read three non-fiction texts, answer a few questions about each text, and then write an informational essay synthesizing the information from all three texts.  I had the opportunity to administer the performance task to my first period a few weeks ago.  Last week I attended a day long training learning how they will be scored. I scored my first period students' essays and have decided to use the results as a learning opportunity.  After I give students their scores, we will go through the task a second time with my guidance.  They will rewrite their essays, and I am confident they will do MUCH better!  This is definitely a learning experience for all!

Both English CP and English 7H will be reading "A Children's Story," "Harrison Bergeron," "The Pedestrian," and The Giver.  You may enjoy reading them as well!  






My students are the BEST!
On another note, I have been enjoying the joys of spring at my house.  A hummingbird built a nest under our satellite dish!  I adore hummingbirds.  The nest looks big in the pictures, but it is actually about the size of a golf ball.  The two eggs are the size of Jelly Bellies.  I can't wait until the hatch!



Isn't it amazing that the nest is built on a WIRE?

I read that hummingbirds use spiderwebs to hold their nests together!


 We also have a dove nesting on our fence.  She also has two eggs in her nest!

Sweet Mama Dove!




Comments

  1. Max LevyMarch 11, 2015 at 7:48 AM

    What I liked most about Tom Sawyer is all of the descriptive details Twain uses in the story. I think you should teach TS again next year, but show the movie after reading the book!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMarch 11, 2015 at 8:00 AM

    The one thing I liked the most about Tom Sawyer was how old fashioned it was. I loved reading the words that they used to speak and some of them were even comical. I sometimes wish I could live in that time period. Everything was so much more simple. My favorite part of the book was when they went to the graveyard to cure their warts with the dead cat. I thought all of the superstitions were hilarious and very outrageous and they always found a way to make an excuse for it when it didn't work. I really think you should teach Tom Sawyer next year it was a great learning experience and was very fun.

    ~Erik McCutchen

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMarch 11, 2015 at 8:12 AM

    I thought the book was good but it was not personally the book for me. It was not very relatable to me, and was not my sense of humor. Even though this book was not my cup of tea I did learn from it and the activities we did in class. I did find some ways to enjoy the book and didn't think this experience was horrible.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMarch 11, 2015 at 8:16 AM

    Tom Sawyer was an interesting book, and it's author had a very distinct writing style. Although the vocabulary in this book was very outdated, I still appreciated how well written it was.
    ~ Ada Ellisman

    ReplyDelete
  5. TeachermamaMarch 11, 2015 at 5:09 PM

    Thanks for the feedback! You are all so mature about how you comment!

    ReplyDelete
  6. TeachermamaMarch 11, 2015 at 5:09 PM

    Thanks for the feedback! You are all so mature about how you comment!

    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....
6 comments
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
27 comments
Read more