Welcome Back!!

It was so good to be back at school this week.  We really seemed to hit the ground running, but not without being purposeful in our use of the extra time before college classes started.  Sometimes it's easy to forget that the kids have not spent an extortionate amount of time with everyone.  They know most of their class at this point, but they don't know all of their class as well as we'd like.

We lengthened all three daily high school classes, Monday through Wednesday, with the understanding that the extra time would be spent getting to know our knew groups and each other better.  It was definitely time well spent.  I enjoyed getting to know more about them, and I managed to work one of the activities right into a lesson.

The first part of the week we created similarity wheels, which showed us that while we are very different we have a lot of common ground.  From there we discussed the idea of BEAUTIFUL.  They wrote a journal about what qualifies something for them as beautiful.  Then we discussed how our society defines beautiful for us and how that definition has changed over time.  We then created beautiful collages, which I turned into a wall of beautiful.  It's really cool to see the back wall covered with images that "mean" beautiful to us.

The second class of the week we started reading Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld.  I'm really excited about teaching this novel.  It fits so well into our Global Issues unit.  We will be integrating with Science and Social Studies in a much more direct way, which is fun!  The novel poses so many good questions about our concepts of beauty and waste.  It's an interesting look at what our future could easily become.

This week we'll really get into the discussion of the first 7 or 8 chapters and continue reading the novel.  I hope the kids give it a chance.  It's a really good novel!

Oh and Mrs. Grogan, the junior English teacher, and myself are planning a swap day!  This will give me a chance to get to know the juniors better, and she will have a chance to get to know the freshmen better.  

I'm looking forward to this week!