Snow Ball Poetry

The following activity is a perfect activity for a snowy day; short, simple, and fun.  Yet, at the same time it challenges students to work with, and generate a variety of poetic devices. The activity is adaptable to all grades and the results can be serious, or seriously funny.

The activity is called...Snow Ball Poetry.

1. Students receive a piece of white printer paper
2. Students write a noun...this will become the title of their poem
3. Students ball up the paper to become "snowballs" and proceed to have a "snowball fight"
4. Students grab a snowball that is not their own
5. Students write the first two lines of a poem that matches the title...it must have a poetic device in it.
6. When done students repeat steps three and four
7. Then students write lines 3 and 4...with a different poetic device
8. Students repeat steps three and four

Repeat this process as many times as you feel comfortable

9. The final step should be the title repeated.

Afterwards, have students stand up and share the completed poems. They can even vote on the best one.

As I said before, the students love this activity. It is engaging and it is a great way to work on poetry in a low stakes writing environment. Furthermore, you can differentiate the strategy to fit any learner or any age.

I hope it works, let me know if you try it and like it in a comment below!

Halloween Writing Activity

It's that time of year - Halloween. What a great time of year to teach mood and suspense in writing and film. Kids love scary stories and movies. As educators we need to embrace there love and incorporate some fun into our lessons.

As a writing teacher, I am always struggling to find ways for students to write, and to enjoy it. Students all to often are afraid to try to write creatively because they may fail. I believe the fear of failure in students derives from high stakes testing and all too often high stakes writing. Students need to feel comfortable writing in a low stakes environment. They need to feel that what they are doing is fun! If you can get kids to buy into the lesson you will have a much easier time in life.

So below here is my mini-lesson for Halloween:

Mini-preview:
- Students will group write several Halloween stories all at once. They will try to create mood, develop characters, and establish suspense.

1. Set-up:
1. Students needs to get in groups of three or four
2. Every student needs a piece of paper
3. Prompts:
1. on the board write:
1. It was a dark and stormy night
2. "What was that...I heard something"  
2. Lesson:
1. Every student selects one of the prompts and begins to write their story.
1. Students should focus on creating the setting, the mood, and the introduce the characters
2. After five minutes students rotate papers to the right
1. Students should begin to introduce the conflict of their new story. They must maintain the style of the original author
3. After five minutes students should rotate again
1. Students should try to resolve the conflict
4. After five minutes students should rotate again
1. Conclude the story...they may add a cliffhanger
3. Afterwards:
1. Students should read their stories and vote on the best one
4. Benefits:
1. Students will be writing for 20 minutes solid
1. building stamina
2. Students must maintain the original author's style and intent
1. work on style, and purpose
3. Establish mood
1. mood and setting
4. Go through a plot chart
5. Optional:
1. Music:
1. I usually play Pandora's scary symphonies channel during this lesson. It helps them buy into the lesson 

I believe this is a great lesson. Give it a shot.

Summer Assignments

I know, I know. We are coming to the end of the first marking period. Why on earth would I talk about the summer!

Here's why? How much time out of the nine weeks did you waste in the beginning of the year, if you are like most probably a lot. You asses your students, go over rules, play get to you games and finally, maybe you get to literacy by week three.

Fifteen days of wasted time.

Oh and kids are asking for suggestions, you hardly know them...what to do.

This brief reflection actually can help save you time down the road. I give my students a summer reading assignment to help prevent that summer slide we hear oh so much about. I will be be honest, a lot of the assignment is taken ala cart from various other summer assignments so it isn't perfect...but it is perfect for me.

Assignment in a nut shell:

1. At the end of the year I do an extremely brief book talk for my incoming students on about 10 to 13 books. 
1. The idea is to just pique their interest
2. Pick high quality books, that have a mix of topics/genres/length/etc.
3. The list is breathing document...if something is "old" to kids they won't read it. Keep it fun for them! It's their summer!
2. The students read two books of their choice and fill out a simple table form:
1. That contains:
1. Author
2. Three Important quotes
3. Conflict
4. Purpose
5. And a signature
3. The very first day of school we group up based on our books and in their group they:
1. Make a poster combining all of their ideas
1. They must vote on the three best quotes
2. What was the conflict, purpose etc? 
2. Then they share their book with  the class

The students love this! It usually takes a day or two, and while they are doing it I can take time to circulate the room and get to know their reading habits, and talk with them about the books. Every year without fail the students get each other to read books they would never like. 

It amazes me how this happens. The kids start asking questions about the books, They borrow from each other. It's great! 

As a teacher the benefits are great. 

• Get to know the kids in a relaxed setting
• Set the tone that literacy and reading are important in my classroom
• Reading can be social and fun!
• I don't waste time. 

That last point I want to hit on real fast before I go. Think about this conversation. In the first few days, I've introduced conflict, purpose, and close reading without every forcing it on students. They may have disagreed over the quotes but they had to defend it. 

I strongly urge you to try it! Think about where you'd be if you didn't waste those first few precious weeks with get to know you activities and instead used a get to know you literacy activity. 

I follow the activity with literary history...which is a post for another day! 

A Preview of the Year

This year I will be embarking on a new voyage. I am still going to be a middle school English teacher (7th and 8th) and I will still have my section of AP English. But this year, I am going to finally start becoming an instructional coach. This is well before my 5 year plan, so I am pumped. I will not be getting into much detail about it right now, as I have a 2 year crying in his crib and I still have loads of work to do, but I thought I'd give a small preview of what I am going to try to accomplish this year.

1. PLC- I am starting a PLC in my building (I know we are behind the curve) and we are going to focus on the book "Teach Like a Pirate"
2. PD- I am offering PD in reading strategies, writing strategies, how data can inform curriculum and instruction, among many other opportunities
3.  Conference- I will be a break out presenter at the KSRA conference. I am hoping to eventually publish a paper but who knows.

I will keep you posted. So far I am excited!!

Breaking apart words while reading

Here is a short video clip on ways for students to break apart words while continuously reading. This is only a small sample of the numerous ways you can help your students!

Reflections: Zull: From Brain to Mind

Chapter Six: The Basics

            In the sixth chapter of Zull’s text entitled The Basics Zull discusses how our brains understand symbols.  Zull opens the chapter (after his narrative introduction) with the sentence, “Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the human brain is its ability to represent ourselves, our world, our images, our feelings, and our experiences with symbols and combinations of symbols” (Zull 142) According to Zull the two most apparent examples of the brain’s ability to do this are in the form of math and language, believing both to be symbolic systems. Zull feels one of the primary goals or “basic” goals of education are to help students develop their understanding of these two symbolic systems.  I believe this is true too. While reading the two most important sections for me were: How to Fall into the Trap on page 151 and An Alternative: Math through Experience on page 159.     

            Zull opens the chapter with an account of a freshman class whose understanding of DNA is greatly exaggerated.  Metaphorically speaking the class can talk the talk of DNA but they cannot walk the walk. They have no true understanding of the nature of DNA. Zull circles back to this story in the section, How to Fall into the Trap. As a middle school teacher I found this section to be particularly powerful because I can relate to the idea of students “knowing” something without mastering it. Or as Zull points out, they are learning it without images. They are not connecting it to anything and therefore students are not finding meaning. For me, this is most evident with grammar. A lot of advanced grammatical concepts fall in the 7^th and 8^th grade state standards. In this case I am saying advanced in the sense of moving away from basic parts of speech and into clauses, phrases, gerunds etc. I try very hard to teach grammar as “organically” as possible by trying to embed grammar lessons into the students writing, and by working on different grammatical issues with different student groups based on their needs; but, I can still sense the dread in my students when we discuss grammar. By the end of the units, I feel my students have the basic understanding. However, as previously mentioned, I have students two years in a row. So much like Zull’s freshman when we circle back to a topic the next year my students can talk about it, but still make the same mistakes.

            This past year I had an 8^th grader who wrote in a very boring style. All of his sentences were structurally the same, either simple or sometimes compound with a basic conjunction. In 7^th grade I introduce and discuss dependent clauses. When I asked him what they were as an 8^th grader he could give me a pretty close definition. So I tried to have him show me a dependent clause in his writing.  He struggled to find any, and furthermore he struggled to add any into his writing. I grew frustrated because I felt like I had covered the material.  In the end, he was able to add some sentence variation to his writing, but still needed prompting to do so. While reading this chapter of Zull, I could not help but draw parallels from his freshman students to my middle school students. They could not connect to the grammatical concepts because they were not able to create images and meaning to the symbols. 

While writing this and while reading the chapter I find myself wondering how can I create symbols when teaching grammar in a way that is meaningful to my students in order for them to understand grammar.  Do they see grammar rules as something “silly” that is done in English class, but everyone can read and write, so do they really have to know what a gerund is?  A goal I have for myself this year is to figure out ways to make grammar meaningful for my students.

On a more personal note, I found myself reminiscing about my undergrad years when reading the section, “An Alternative: Math Through Experience.”  Through high school, and most of college I had been a liberal arts person. I gravitated towards History and English as opposed to Math and Science. In fact, I viewed them as classes you had to take in order to graduate. I survived them, I memorized the formulas I needed in order to pass the course.  I was not invested in them.  This changed when I got to my junior year in college. I needed one more math credit to fulfill my general education credits. I asked around and I find out that Astronomy in the summer was easy and it counted as both a math and a science credit. I always liked the idea of space, so, I enrolled. An interesting thing happened. I actually enjoyed it.  We had to calculate the weight of stars and planets and guess cosmic bodies flight patterns etc. For whatever reason, I found that I really enjoyed the math. It was crazy (I know not professional) to me how I could figure out the distance between Earth and other planets. I did not think it was possible for me to do this because I always hated math. But yet, here I was figuring out the density of other planets and what that would mean to an astronaut exploring the planet.

I mention this because I wonder what would have been different in my life if I had a math or science teacher in high school, or middle school that encouraged this kind of math exploration. I could have very well ended up working as a math teacher, or even an engineer of some kind. When Zull says, “The most effective education comes from the natural interests and instincts of each learner, developed through his or her own experiences” (159).  By which Zull means the joy of learning. I enjoyed learning about these big math problems because they meant something to me. In high school I did not enjoy learning about a small math problem from a book because I could not connect to it. It was a task that needed completed to graduate, not a ticket to explore the cosmos.

This chapter really focused on Zull’s premise of moving the brain to the mind. How we as educators really need to be specific in our approaches and how we need to remember how our students’ brains work.  I liked how at the end of the chapter Zull reminds the reader (presumably educators) to remember the impact of images and how the use of them can bring joy to learners.  

Learning to Compose a story for Print

Here is a short self-contained video on how to elicit a students response when writing a story.  Things to remember:

1. Don't ask to many questions
2. Don't correct to much
3. Allow for expansion
4. Allow for pregnant pauses.

Also, thanks to my wife for participating in the video.

The video should speak for itself! Enjoy!