Spring Is Definitely Here (Translation: My Students Have Become Wiggly)!

Yay!  That's all I have to say about being done with M-Step testing (except for make-ups).  Maybe, just maybe, we can now get back to normal class time.  Last week my 1st Hour English 9 was right on track, but the rest of the day was chaotic at best.  Because I was missing significant numbers in all of my English 11 hours from Tuesday through Friday, they had lots of reading time, and it began to feel like the perpetual study hall.  I did have them write a 5-paragraph essay on stages of genocide in their books, and incorporated a few video clips related to the books, squeezing in some Type 1 writings, but if your student was out for testing, I excused them from the Type 1's because it would be very difficult to make it up, and they're already maxed out from testing.  (I must be maxed too, since last night I had a dream that Mrs. VanWasshenova and I took our 4th Hour class to Okemos, my hometown, to take the M-Step at my friend Julie's house.  When we got there, I realized I brought the wrong "tickets" for them to sign in with, then I kept spinning in circles debating whether to take them on a tour of my old stomping grounds, or trying to get them into the test.  Weird!)

This week I'm hoping to get us back on track, so here's what's up:

• In English 9 we are finishing the movie To Kill a Mockingbird on Monday.  They have been doing a comparison/contrast chart while watching; now we'll create a Venn Diagram and reflect on why those differences occurred.  From there, it's on to poetry!  We'll start our unit with vocabulary, so they'll get the words on Monday, find definitions by Tuesday, look for examples throughout the week, then quiz on Friday.  I'm going to show them some Slam Poetry video clips and we're going to immerse ourselves in poetry books, looking for both poets and poems we love.  They'll be logging what they read and identifying favorite poems to share with the class at the end of the hours.  They'll also be looking at poems I love and answering questions on both poetry structure and meaning as we go through the week.
• In English 11 we are finishing the Human Rights unit.  All books should be read by the time they come to class on Monday.  We will be filling out an outline with examples and quotations from the book to analyze how human rights fit into their book, and then we'll take it to the core question:  how do we try to ensure that all people are given their basic human rights?  They will use the outlines to create group project presentations on Prezi to share ideas, collaborate to come to a consensus, create an online format for presentation, then share their ideas with the class.  This will be the culminating activity of the unit.  At that point we will be able to change our focus to a unit around the book Night.

It's such a busy time...for everyone.  I hope everyone feels free to contact me whenever they have a question, comment, or concern.  One way or another, we'll all get through this, and hopefully we'll be better people for having experienced it all!

I hope everyone has a fabulous weekend getting some much-needed Vitamin D!  Ciao!


Spring Is Definitely Here (Translation: My Students Have Become Wiggly)! by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at Mrs. Stubbs's English Blog.