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!