Seriously, Week Three???

I don't know how we've come this far in this short of a time. WOW! This year is flying already, and I guess it's because I'm having so much fun!  This past week, we went through a series of poetry stations, delving deeper into the connections between poetry and the river.

Students typed and submitted to me via email their "Battle of Redwood Triolets".  They were a lot of fun to hear and read.  I hope they were fun to write!

One station asked students to imagine what would have inspired a poet to write a particular haiku.  They had to write a paragraph that painted the scene that could have been the source of the haiku situation that was ultimately boiled down into a haiku.

At another station, students read a selection from Mark Twain, "Two Ways of Seeing a River."  Once they read and discussed the reading as a group, they sought out examples of figurative language that Twain used in the piece.

They did a Read! Listen! Write! activity.  They read a selection by Pat Mora, which talked about the nature of poetry and the resemblance to a river.  Then they listened to Langston Hughes talk about the inspiration for his poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."  And finally, they came up with five to ten ways that poetry was like a river and explained how poetry did the things a river did.  For example, they might say that a river can be deep and at times shallow and a poem can be deep in meaning and at times shallow in meaning (no deeper meaning, surface level).

The last station was Poetry Poker.  Word cards are dealt to the players who have a chance to discard and try to build the strongest hand possible with the five words they have.  In the end they manipulate the words to create a line of poetry.

When we finished with the stations, I performed a Miguel Pinero poem for the class.  We then looked at various examples of performance poetry.  Each group randomly selected one of the poems I had picked out to perform this upcoming week.

We've just been building, building, building.  I'm excited to see what comes next.

Week Two? How'd that Happen??

I can't believe tomorrow will mark our third week of school already!  It's been a lot of work, but it has also been a ton of fun!

This week we went over the syllabus for my class .  I know it is important and a college ready skill, but it's not much fun.  I must think of a better way to do that!  Luckily we had a chance to at least start in on some poetry.

Monday afternoon we did some team building games in front of K Building.  I was responsible for ALL ABOARD.  The object of the game is to get all of your group on a sheet.  Pretty easy at first, but after every successful attempt, I fold the sheet in half.  C Group did the best; they got the entire class on a quarter of a sheet.  I also had them sit on the ground back to back and lock elbows.  Then they had to work together to get up and race.  We did it in pairs, quartets, and sextets.  It was very entertaining to watch...speaking of which, I have some video to edit.

Tuesday, I explained the rules of our WATER BALLOON EXTRAVAGANZA!  Basically, it's a huge 4 team game of capture the flag, with water balloons.  That afternoon, we headed to Redwood park and played.  It was a good day.

The last class of the week, we managed to analyze "Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy and students wrote a triolet about their exploits during the Battle of Redwood.  They will be turning in their analysis and presenting their triolets the first half of this upcoming week.  I'm excited to hear them.  Triolets are always so much fun!

I also began assessing students during English Lab to get an idea of where everyone is with their fluency and reading comprehension.  It'll be nice to have the English Lab to work on literacy skills and strengthen student understanding.

We finished the week off with a cold rainy trip down the New River, but we had fun.  The kids were awesome and everyone seemed to have a great time!

Up next, poetry poker, stations, and maybe some performance poetry!

Back in the Freshman Saddle Again!

Well, after the CECHS staff switcheroo this past summer, I've found myself back on the freshman team, teaching English I.  I won't lie, I'm pretty stoked to be teaching English again.  And I'm especially excited to be teaching freshman again.  I love the energy freshman bring to the classroom.


We started the first day with a little getting to know each other activity.  I used the questions to learn more about the students and to let them know more about me.  We also established four clock buddies or appointments.  This will allow us to quickly meet up with a partner throughout the semester.  The entire grade level team has been able to make use of them, so that's pretty cool.

We are off and running with poetry. Students wrote "I Am" poems and published them on my back bulletin board.  It's a lot of fun to read them and see the different ways each student expressed his or her individuality through the final piece.

We got to play around with Poetry Knots, which are usually referred to as Human Knots.   The difference in my class is that we use this exercise to draw an analogy between untying our human knot and untangling the meaning in a piece of poetry.  We learned that sometimes we need to step back and get a different perspective and other times we need to get deep inside to unlock meaning.  We also learned how important it is to communicate with each other and help each other unlock meaning.

As a grade level, we had a giant slip-n-slide, which was symbolic of our freshmen launching themselves into their future as they begin their high school and college careers. Unfortunately, a massive storm rained on our fun.  We had to make a run for campus and pretty much everyone and everything got drenched.  But the students were awesome!  If there attitude during that pounding rain is an indication of this year, it's going to be an incredible adventure!

We finished the week with some time in the pool and team building outside in the morning. Then we watched The Ron Clark Story.  Ron Clark's Essential 55 are the building blocks for the culture we try to create at CECHS, it's important that we look at where those rules came from and why they are important.

Overall, this has been a FANTASTIC first week of school.  I am looking forward to diving deeper into poetry next week and getting to know my students even better!