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!

Twitter Discussion

I had a chance to allow all four of my classes have a discussion with each other, not me!  I pulled myself out of the mix for the most part.  But I added a layer of technology to give depth and another dimension to the talk.  It also limited me to 140 characters or less.

In each class, I had a moderator to help lead and guide the discussion, and I had at least one technical facilitator.  I had asked the kids to create twitter accounts for us to use as part of the discussion.  I projected my account on the big screen and the technical facilitator refreshed and interjected digital commentary as needed.  I also had a student volunteer to be text relayer, relaying comments sent to their phone via text message.

My goal was to give everyone a voice and allow for some sidebar, but related, conversations to take place.  It was for the most part successful.  In some classes the conversation flowed better than others and the direction of the conversations were varied.  The basis of each conversation was framed around the question of what it means to be college ready and how Seminar can help prepare them for the challenges ahead.

There was a lot of contradictions overall.  Things like the request for stricter policies and deadlines being followed by a desire not to change too suddenly or at all.  Some said that they needed to learn self discipline or to be self sufficient or maturity but also said that those things couldn't be taught.

One of the biggest revelations I had today was how varied needs are.  In one class, they wanted the nuts and bolts of registering for classes and in another they got hung up on learning to cook and do laundry.  So my next step will be to create a "Readiness" self evaluation.  It will include categories that delve deeper into "Ready for College, Ready for Career, Ready for Life." 

I will then have students use the evaluations to determine what they need to get out of Seminar this spring.  I will be meeting with students to provide them with some feedback and talk through their evaluation.

From the conferences, I want to move to "Goal" folders.  I'm thinking like a workshop type time that will allow students to delve deeper into the areas they feel they need the most work.  Each "Goal" would have a set of activities.  Students could then "defend" the learning they've done during the individual time.

It's still taking shape, but the outline is becoming clear!

Blogger License Revoked

I've not blogged about class in so long that I'm pretty sure my license is going to be revoked or expire or something!

This past month we had two more days of service, and continued through The Six Most important Decisions book. We've actually wrapped up Parents and are making our way into Dating and Sex. We had some good discussions last week as we looked at survey results.

It was fun to look at how little or how much some students knew about their parents and vise versa. I think it offered a good opportunity for my students to have a conversation with their parents. Even some who swore they knew everything and told their parents everything tended to get something wrong.

This week we've started in on rules of dating. Students are currently posting personal type pages as a blog on NING. They can get extra credit by replying to someone's ad blog with a hyperlink to their own personal page.

I am going to try to make an effort to be better at this!

Cursed!

I think I might actually be cursed. And I'm pretty sure they're going to revoke my seminar license. We had another eventful Friday to say the least. But before we get into that, let's take a look back at the week. Moving along with the second decision, Friends, we wrote another journal before exploring friendship survival tips. The journal was, "Write about something nice you can plan to do for a friend or group of friends in the near future. How will this improve your relationship?" The class was split into groups that each had a single tip to explain or illustrate to the class. It was kind of interesting seeing what they took a way from each tip.

The second part of the class we wrote another journal:
“It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends.” Explain. Is this true? Give examples. This part of the book focused on peer pressure. There was some good conversation about how to stand up to peer pressure. Mr. Pitts also flew us all to UNC from the moo I think via Google Earth. It was really cool being able to zoom in on areas of the campus and see some pictures. It made things on Friday's trip stand out that much more.

Friday we rolled out as close to 7:30 as I could make it. Thankfully we had Mrs. Bolick as a guest driver! She really did save the day; although, most of the kids had no idea. The trip was much longer than I had planned on, so we missed our tour time. But Ms. Brody got the kids into an informational lecture, which was very informative. Then we ate lunch in the pit! It was really a chill day. The unfortunate part was that we had limited time. So after enjoying the culture of the pit, we headed to Franklin Street where we got to do some shopping and take in more of the culture.

The kids seemed to really enjoy the relaxed nature of the day. However, my curse struck again! We had gotten to Statesville on the way home when I40 turned into a parking lot. Luckily I knew a few ways around. We had to go a bit out of our way, but still made it back to school before the dance...almost an hour late but before the dance!

Next time I'm adding an hour for traffic's sake!

Again!

I'm getting so bad at this. I had a good excuse, but you know what they say about excuses. So let's get right to it. Two weeks ago, we had a crazy week with the PSAT. We had our normal Wednesday morning on Tuesday, and then Tuesday afternoon, we had a rotation of PSAT Prep, connections, and Student Led Conference prep. Wednesday morning was the PSAT and that afternoon was a normal Wednesday. Thursday was a regular Thursday, and Friday we returned to service.

So for the one day we had that week, Mr. Pitts led the class through a reflection of their Interviews. They also discussed the top 10 mistakes that applicants make in college essays. They looked at samples and began work on theirs.

Come Thursday, I was out with sick babies. My daughter ended up with an ear infection, and they thought that my son had strep. I stayed out with Zayden the rest of that week and the first part of this past week. I didn't get back to school until Wednesday.

The first part of the week was spent peer editing essays. The second part of the week students participated in a fish bowl discussion of Friends.

Friday we had Accuplacer testing in the morning and The Crucible in the afternoon.

This week we will continue to explore Friends.