The High's and Low's of the Year

It's that time of year...the end. The dog day's of teaching. This is that time of year where teachers answer the question, what are we doing here? And what should I do with my students? Hopefully, some of the good teachers are asking? What worked? What will my students remember?

Here are two good ideas for the end of the year.

1. The highs and lows.
 Have each student construct a chart. On the y axis a student should place an H and an L.  This will stand for High and Low. On the X axis the students should place M1, M2, M3, M4 for each of the four marking periods( this may change based on your school). Then have your students place a high and a low for every marking period. Eventually on giant sticky notes, the students will combine these highs and lows. Eventually each student will share.  This is a great time to reflect on what students found worth while.

2. ABC's of the year
 Have the students come up with a word or phrase for every letter of the alphabet. For example, the M might stand for Metaphor.  After this is completed, do a rapid fire around the room. With each student saying there words or phrases.

Each of these are short and quick but are very effective. This is a great reflective activity for the students and the teachers. I've done these with every grade 7-12 with great success. Obviously these can be easily modified to fit the needs of your students.

This is a much better use of your time then showing another movie...I promise.

Exit Strategies

 Exit Strategies are a phenomenal formative assessment for any classroom. Incorporating the bell to bell strategy exit strategies are great ways for students summarize what they've learned and refocus themselves.  For teachers it is a great way for us to assess our material. We want to strive for mastery learning not just regurgitating ideas. We want our students to feel they've mastered the material.

I like to use the metaphor of Pluto.   The picture below was taken last year. The mission took ten years. If NASA was off by even a 1/1000th of a degree they would have missed the planet completely.

How many times are we as teachers off by 1/1000th of a degree but we move on. Then we wonder at the end of the year how the students missed the planet of education.  

Below is a table of Exit Strategies that can be adapted to any course and any grade level. Many were adopted from a recent Edutopia article while some are ones I've used in my own classroom. Therefore I can't take credit for all of them. Yet, I can encourage you to try them, and let me know how it goes. 

Strategy[1]	Explanation
Snowball	Students write down what they learned during the lesson on a white piece of paper and wad it up. Given a signal they throw their paper snowballs in the air. Then each student picks up a nearby snowball and reads it aloud.
Twitter	On a notecard or post-it students “tweet” what they’ve learned in the lesson that day. They may use emoji’s and hashtags but their responses must be within 140 characters.  Alternatively, they could write down what they would retweet or quote later.  Answers could be displayed periodically.
Two Dollar Summary	Students write a summary of the lesson. Each word is worth ten cents their summary should add up to two dollars. (Twenty words)
Paper Slide	Have each student make a quick slide about the most important element of the lesson and as they leave they must record their slide.
Even a First Grader Gets It	Students must retell the hardest element of a lesson in terms that a child would understand. They should be able to synthesize the lessons key ideas.
High-Five Hustle	Ask students to stand up, raise their hands and high-five a peer – their short-term buddy. When there are, no hands left, ask a question for them to discuss.  Solicit answers. Then play do the hustle, and have them switch partners.  Repeat several times.
Parent Hotline	Give the students an intriguing question or fact as they leave. Then contact their parents the answer so they can be discussed over dinner.
DJ Summary	Learners write what they’ve learned in the form of a rap or song lyric.
Gallery Walk	On chart paper, small groups write and draw what they’ve learned. After the completed “works” are attached to the classroom walls, others students stick Post-its to the posters giving praise, questions, or extending the ideas.
Sequence It	Students quickly create timelines (on paper or digitally) to represent a sequence or steps in a process
Low-Stakes Quizzes	Give a short tech quiz using technologies likes Socrative, Bubblesheet, Goggle Forms, or Kahoot
Cover It	Have kids sketch the book cover or magazine cover for the lesson. The title is the topic, the author is the student, a short celebrity endorsement or blurb should summarize or articulate the lesson’s benefits
Question Stems	Have students write their own test questions based on the lesson. Begin class the next day with the best questions.
So What?	Have kids answer the following prompt: What takeaways from the lesson will be important to know three years from now, and why?
Dramatize It	Have students act out a real-life situation where they may need to know the information
Beat the clock	Ask question. Give students ten seconds to confer and then call on a random student.  Don’t dismiss them until they can get three right in a row.
Review It	Ask a student a question. As he or she answers the question have the class rate the answer with thumbs up or thumbs down.
Cheat Sheet	Have kids create a pretend cheat sheet they would use if they had a surprise pop quiz.
Simile Me	Have students complete the following sentence: The (concept or skill) is like _____________ because ______________
Ask it Basket	Have students write a question they still have, or something they’d like to discuss later and place it in a basket as they leave the room.
Red Light/Green Light	Give students a blank picture of a stoplight. Have them fill in the color that represents their comfort with the material. Red-means stop and recover, yellow- means proceed with caution and Green – proceed and move on.
Caption It	Have students write an Instagram or snapchat caption for the lesson. They can include filters if they want.
Cook It Up	Turn your understanding of the lesson into a recipe
Telephone	Have one student say a fact from the lesson. Have them whisper it to their partner, repeat this step through the class, at the end see if the fact is still accurate and the original fact.
Noble Peace Prize	Have students write their acceptance speech of the future Nobel Peace Prize. The information from the lesson should help them win the award.
ABC	Have the students complete the ABC’s with a word, phrase or fact about the lesson for each letter of the alphabet. Can be done as a round robin, group, or randomly selected.

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[1] Many of the strategies came from edutopia.org 

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!