Second Week of School in English 7H

Love the SMILES

They don't look too miserable, do they?

The first few weeks of school are challenging. Everything is so new to the seventh-graders, and it really takes time to get them acclimated to procedures and "how we do things." For example, in my class alone: students signed up for my Google Classroom, created a turnitin.com account, creating a noredink.com account, and creating a Schoology account! This is in addition to their main account to log in to the computers at school. In order to help students with this, I gave each child a paint swatch from Home Depot. We create each account in class together, and I had them write down their user name and password for each account on the paint swatch. If they had a phone, I encouraged them to take a picture of the swatch in case they lost it! Of course, there were still students who said that things like, "Schoology won't let me in." I insisted they take out the paint swatch, and sure enough, they had typed in the wrong user name! :) However, I have been doing this long enough to know that the first few weeks are the hardest, and after that, the kids know exactly what to do!

You will see this in your child's backpack!

In addition, we read an article called "The Secret of Straight A Students." I explained and modeled how to annotate a text.

Getting out of their seats to share annotations

This is to prepare them for our upcoming Article of the Week Assignment. I will be modeling all aspects of this assignment, as well as having students practice in class before assigning our first Article of the Week. After students become experts on annotating, we will learn how to complete the written portion of the assignment. This week I had them get out of their seats and share their best annotation with three different people.

I gave them a sentence frame to guide them. As I circulated around the room, I was truly impressed by their insights and conversations. As usual, I am SO enjoying my students!

Sentence Frame for Sharing

Students sharing annotations!

They are AMAZING

Comments

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