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!

Reflections: Zull: From Brain to Mind (Part Five)

Chapter Five: Getting the Picture

            In the fifth chapter of his book, Zull shifts focus to the power of an image. He begins the chapter with a description of how one imagine can conjure up another image. In this case, the image of a boy putting his arm around a girl and a knowledge of clouds.  Zull’s research has lead him to assert that images are extremely critical in the journey of Brain to Mind. This chapter was impacted me personally and professionally.  The two most impactful ideas in this chapter to me were: how we need to start teaching the power of images at a young age, and how instructionally we need to be mindful of the images we choose.

Zull believes images are critca to the journey of brain to mind to be particularly true for newborns and toddlers. He believes that we should make sure we are teaching and exposing children to images that are impactful to their lives and meaningful to the child’s development.

            One of the images that Zull feels we should focus on with infants is a face. As a father of a young 22 month-old. I found this section to be personally very interesting. As our son is beginning to learn language and move from babbling to speaking it is amazing to see what words he picks up and words he struggles with. Until reading this section, I assumed it was almost random. But, now looking around our house it makes sense. One of the first words our son really learned was “ball.”  We have lots of balls in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and a lot of his books have pictures of balls in them.  Any round sphere is now a ball. But he probably associated that image as important.  Furthermore, we have always been good about learning facial expressions and showing him faces of our extended family. It is always a nice party trick when he shows up to a family gathering and can say someone’s name after not seeing them in a long time. Zull would probably say that he saw that we were excited when he could see the image and recall its name and he felt rewarded therefore he wanted to repeat the process numerous times. 

            As for my professional life, I found myself wondering about how I use images in my classroom. More specifically what am I using the images for? What is there purpose. Zull states in the section, “Being Mindful” on page 136 that images should be: complex, cause genuine reflection, and are personal. In my classroom I can think of two major uses of images, one for vocabulary, and one for close reading.

            Every few weeks, I give my students a cumulative vocabulary quiz. It is essentially a review test of previous quizzes. In order to review I play a review game that combines Pictionary and Charades. The class is divided into teams and each team sends up a volunteer and the student then must either act out the word or draw the word. The students really do get into the game, even though they do not win a prize. However, now I understand the benefits of the game. The students are remembering the actions or drawings of the volunteers and associating it with the word. So later when they see a word like, “bequeath” the student associates the word with a student “dying and giving me his wallet as a ghost”.  Much like how Zull associates the names of clouds with young love. The images created by the students are complex, and personal. They remember the image over a rote definition.

            The other common way I incorporate images into my curriculum is when I teach and reteach close reading. I find students learn better when they understand the “why” not just the “what” so to teach why we close read I like to use images and movie clips. I use old “Highlights” magazine hidden images pictures throughout the year as a warm-up activity. I use the image to reinforce the idea in students that they may see the picture but miss the details, and when we close read we need to understand all the details in the picture. On one hand, it is fun, not time consuming, and my students enjoy trying to find the hidden pictures. On the other hand, students are making the connection to “re-reading” the picture and “re-reading” the text. 

An activity I also use that goes hand-in-hand with the “Highlights” pictures is I like to show movie clips from classic movies and have students watch multiple viewings of them and watch as the students’ understanding of the movie grows. One particularly powerful clip comes from “North By Northwest” an Alfred Hitchcock movie. In the film, there is a scene in which the main character shoots a woman in a restaurant at Mt. Rushmore. After the first “read” of the movie I ask basic questions such as, “Who is the good guy?” and “Where are they?”. Without fail most students think the hero is the bad guy, because he shoots a woman, and they are just at a restaurant. Mt. Rushmore is prominently featured in the background taking up almost half the screen and yet my students miss it.  So like Zull suggested, I pause it, and let students digest what they are seeing. Even without the context of the whole movie students begin to see that the setting of Mt. Rushmore must be crucial to the setting of the movie.  I have found this activity to be very successful in showing students why you re-read and how even good readers miss important details the first time.  The images become a way for my students to understand the “why” of close reading and not just the “what”. They remember not seeing the hidden object at first, or the giant president’s head in the background when they read and know that is why they should re-read they may have missed something.

After reading Zull, I firmly believe that I should double down on these practices next year. I use to know they were impactful but not why they were impactful. After reading this section I now understand why students enjoy these activities and why they are learning from them.  I am going to challenge myself to try to incorporate more images (both mine and student created) into my lessons next year. The power of images is something I am not tapping into that I feel could positively impact my students’ growth in the classroom.