April Showers, Will They Bring May Flowers?

As I sit here listening to the wind try to rip the roof off of my house, I remember that all this spring weather is necessary to bring in one of my favorite times of year:  May and its spring flowers!  I love the flowering trees, the daffodils, the tulips, the green grass after a long cold winter.  I'm so looking forward to it (though my tulips are already popped up; I hope a late cold snap doesn't damage them). 

I also love this time of year because we're into some of my favorite content of the year!  In English 9 we'll be finishing what is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest novels of all time:  To Kill a Mockingbird.  Then we'll move on to poetry and The Odyssey.  In English 11 we're working on our Human Rights unit, a topic that I consider the core of everything I believe in.  This will take us to the end of the year because we follow up what we're doing now with Elie Wiesel's haunting autobiography Night, which is his personal journey surviving Auschwitz.  Most of my students enjoy these units and the interest level is high; that certainly makes my job easier!  So here's what's coming up in the next week:

• In English 9 we have completed our argumentative essay.  I still have a couple out (for a variety of reasons), but those that were turned in are graded and on HAC.  From here we will finish the book, hopefully this week!  Most of this week will be spent reading; what follows are assessments (traditional objective test and traditional analytical essay) and the movie.  They will have vocabulary this week, as well, so expect to see those vocab. worksheets on Monday!
• In English 11 we're continuing with the reading of their books.  This is such a challenging unit for me because each book is different in length and content, and they're all at different places in the books (despite using a calendar to set benchmarks), so I'm trying to keep some on track who do not like to read, and then I have those who love to read who want to finish the book...now!  We're doing mini-lessons on literary content, reading time, and I need to work in the discussions at the end of the hour.  I'm also going to add variety by replacing some of the mini-lessons with short video clips that connect to the themes in the books.  I do not have vocabulary for them right now for two reasons:  it's too hard to pull relevant vocab. from their books, and they have plenty on their plates right now.  To tackle the issue of my quick readers, I've created some extra credit with a second book for them to work on.  I'll have this available starting tomorrow.

I've enjoyed having time to work on things at my own pace, but I'm ready to get back in the swing of things; I hope everyone else is, as well.  Have a great week...ciao!


April Showers, Will They Bring May Flowers? by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License