Student Intereset Survey + Goal Setting Lesson Plan

So, Monday (tomorrow) marks the first day of the 2007-2008 school year in most counties that I’ve heard of in Georgia.  Monday is also the official start of my first year as a teacher.  I’ve been told horror stories, but I’ve also been given lots of reassurances.  I’m hopeful that if I remain consistent and fair in my discipline plan, I will be able to gain student’s respect.  I’m already looking forward to the days when I have students that will spread the word and allow me to have a reputation that precedes their coming into my class.

I’ve been trying to do a lot of preparation, but it has been difficult.  So far, I can confidently say that I am as prepared as I can be for the first day of school.  I have my syllabi all printed out and I have my Student Information Sheet and Interest Survey ready to go.  My number one goal is to establish myself as a strict authority figure, immediately.  My number two goal is to get to know my students as well as I can, on an individual level, as early as possible.  I created this fairly open-ended interest survey in order to do that.

In addition to going over the syllabus/code of conduct/expectations and all that good stuff, on the first day.  I have my digital camera ready to take pictures of each and every student (although, I will be taking them in groups of 3-4).  I want to be able to have pictures to fill up the bulletin boards.  I figure that it will help me remember their names and make them feel more comfortable in my classroom.  I hope to create a really close-knit community in my classroom, so I’ve been brainstorming ways of doing that.  I think the best way that I have come up with is trying to make students feel, as much as possible, that this classroom is theirs, just as much as it is mine, and to ask for their opinions as much as possible.

On Day 2 I plan on using a Goal Setting Lesson that will enable students to better understand how I formulate goals for their class and help them set goals for themselves, both short and long term.  A lot of the students that I will be teaching are considered at-risk.  Meaning, I suppose, that they are at-risk of not graduating from high school and continuing in the cycle of generational poverty, which is a big problem in this city.  Many of them have no models for goal setting and many of their parents don’t talk about what what they will do five years from now.  So, I am going to try to make this a big part of my classroom and find ways for students to continue to monitor their progress and set new goals.

In Carol Ann Tomlinson’s How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, she offers an activity that is perfect for extending the ideas taught in the Goal Setting Lesson.  One of her ideas for differentiating is allowing students a day within a unit to set their own goals and come up with a plan, or set of activities, that they are going to engage in to meet their goals for the day.  She calls it Design-A-Day, and many members from my college cohort have had many good things to say about it. 

I’m trying not to bring textbooks in until the second or third week of the school year, so what I start students out with is a diagnostic test so that I know where they stand in terms of ability in all the criteria that they will be tested on.  On that same day, I plan on guiding them again through Georgia’s college preparation website GeorgiaCollege411 and the CollegeBoard website.  We’ll probably have discussions about learning interests, scholarships, tuition, college majors, and post-college opportunities, as well as a short Q&A session about what to expect in and from college life.

On Thursday and Friday I’m going to do a mini-unit based on names.  We will read a vignette from House on Mango Street called “My Name,” in which the main character, Esperanza, gives a very lyrical explanation and description of her name.  Students will discuss the vignette and names and general.  They will end the week by writing their own short vignettes about their name.

Now down to “real” planning . . . . 

I don’t know about all of you teachers out there, but I’m ALREADY exhausted . . .

So I didn’t look hard enough … Lesson Plans for British Literature

I couldn’t leave out the Brit Lit people.  Like I said in the previous post, these lesson plans are based on a set of standards called the Quality Core Curriculum (QCC), which the state of Georgia has already abandoned in the subject area of English Language Arts.  I, however, think that there are still some valuable resources in these pages.  So, if you are teaching British Literature and are looking for some ideas, I would AT LEAST browse here.

For those of you teaching American Literature . . . a gift (I hope)

For my current or future American Literature teachers out there, this link might help you out a little bit.  The state of Georgia has recently finished realigning it’s standards.  (In place of a set of standards that were called QCCs, we now have the GPS, which I find incredibly useful because of how unambiguous and explicit they are in, finally, explaining what it is teachers should be teaching their students in each grade and subject area.  I don’t like too many restrictions when it comes to planning, but it really gives enough guidance to be comforting and leaves enough room for freedom and creativity.  For these reasons, the GPS are quite welcome, as far as I’m concerned.)

Despite the fact that the old standards have been done away with and that these lessons plans have been “deactivated,” there are many, many good ideas within these pages and within these links (to other web sites as well as to lesson plan worksheets).  In the American Literature pages, there are thirteen units with detailed lesson plans, links, worksheets, and ideas for differentiation.  I highly recommend checking it out. 

That means lesson plans for people who teach these novels:

The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and House on Mango Street. 

There are also lesson plans for people who would like resources for:

Native American Literature unit, Colonial American Literature unit, Age of Reason / Rationalism unit, Romanticism unit, American Poetry unit, Realism unit and Modern American Literature unit.

I like a lot of the lesson plans because they try to create plans that require students to use inductive and deductive reasoning skills.  Hopefully you’ll be able to find at least something that you like enough to modify and use for yourself.

I’ve been trying to see if I can find similar pages for World or British Literature.  I’ve yet to find those. 

Of course, GeorgiaStandards.org also provides lesson ideas on that newer site.  Happy Planning!  I’m off to continue rediscovering all the subtle beauties and depths of The Scarlet Letter that eluded me all those years ago, when I first read it in sophomore English.

Beginning the Year

So, it’s the beginning of the year and I’m sure there are many teachers (especially, first year ones, like me) who are scrambling to find productive and engaging activities to start the year off with.  Of all the activities that I have found for beginning the school year, the best one that I have come across is called “The Wright Family Vacation.”  It is a listening activity with a fairly basic procedure.  Students must stand around in a circle, each with a penny in his or her hand, and listen as the teacher reads a passage.  Everytime the students hear the words “left” or “right” in the passage, they are to pass the penny either to the left or the right, accordingly.

The full procedure for this activity may be found, here, in RTF format.  A link to Redkudu’s more recent blog entries can be found to the right, in my blogroll.  The author of this blog has also requested that I add a small caveat explaining that this activity is not her intellectual property, nor is she aware of whom to cite as its creator.

Teaching Tragic Heroes

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching my tenth grade (honors) literature and composition class about tragic heroes.  We are in the middle of a classical tragedy unit and just finished reading Antigone today.  I will be teaching them an adapted form of a lesson that I found here.  It’s a good way for students to learn inductively and actively explore the characteristics that might constitute a tragic hero instead of having a teacher flat out give it to them.

I’ll probably post an update about how that goes.  I just wanted to share the resource with anyone who might be looking for something like that.

In other news, I am very excited about receiving my first phone call from a high school in the county that I am hoping to be hired in.  That was quick, if you ask me.

GCTE Presentation: Graphic Novels, Picture Books and YA Lit

Hello, again.  It’s been a while, but some of the stress that I’ve been experiencing has been lifted off my shoulders this weekend; so, I am temporarily escaping my black hole.  I presented at the GCTE (Georgia Council of Teachers of English) conference at Jekyll Island this past Friday and it went fabulously.  I found the conference to be an extraordinarily enjoyable experience for it being my first time.  I was surprised at how few student and first-year teachers were in attendance, and was also surprised by the fact that so many first-year teachers that I DID see there were over thirty and coming into teaching as a second career.  I’m already excited about the GCTE conference next February, where I hope to present again. 

The second really big thing that happened to me this weekend was that a few people from Houston County came to hear me present.  They seemed really interested and I can’t wait to see where this leads and if I will be getting a job in their school district.  So, that’s exciting.  But, enough about me.  If you are reading this you are probably wanting to hear about the resources I have to share.  And, I do have stuff to share.

I suppose it would be appropriate to start off with my own presentation.  As a refresher, my presentation focused on how to integrate Young Adult Literature into a secondary English Language Arts classroom.  While I say secondary, I believe that some of the lessons that I created would also be appropriate for a seventh or eighth grade classroom, depending on the standards that exist in your state or district and the class goals that you have, individually, set for your students. 

My presentation started out with a PowerPoint that provided a rationale for why Young Adult Literature should be considered for use in a secondary English Language Arts curriculum and how it defies many of the perceptions and misconceptions that many English teachers have about the genre.  Why YA Lit?

My mentor teacher, who presented with me, outlined some YA novels that you could pair with a canonical text in a thematic unit to scaffold student comprehension and understanding of the probably more difficult and less accessible classic text.  My best advice is to use a book, written by Sarah K. Herz and Donald R. Gallo, entitled From Hinton to Hamlet to get ideas for which YA titles would be the best matches for canonical texts.  They include pairings for a wide selection of canonical texts including The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odyssey, The Grapes of Wrath, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, Julius Caesar, and many more canonical titles.  The book also provides information about how you can pair texts up according to the situational and character archetypes they feature.

We concluded the presentation with a brief mention to three lessons that I came up with for incorporating YA Lit into an ELA classroom.  One involves using Graphic Novels to Teach Dialogue (as well as narrative voice and figurative language), and includes a good resource list for those interested in exploring graphic novels.  Another lesson that I created involves using Picture Book to Teach Inferencing.  Included, also, is a list of picture books appropriate for use in a secondary English classroom.  I really enjoyed creating these lessons and feel that they will be useful for helping teachers to see the value and possible use of graphic novels and picture books.  My hope is that English teachers will begin to see these works as resources for scaffolded teaching that reaches engages student interest, instead of harboring misconceptions about and ignoring these works as remedial, immature and not worthy of academic attention.

The last lesson that I included in our presentation packet, is more of a loose outline, or skeleton, if you will, of a unit that may be implemented after a semester or year of student exposure to and reading of YA Lit titles and authors.  The unit idea seeks to bridge YA Lit with Research and Writing in a creative way.

I will try to put up more resources that I obtained at GCTE in the next week, or weeks, to come.  Until then, back to student teaching I go. 

Planning the Media Literacy Unit

After a week of wasting away my time on MySpace and watching worthless television, I’m becoming more optimistic about student teaching and how much of the time I would be spending doing absolutely nothing better will at least be spent trying to become the best teacher that I can be for my now and future students.

I’m in the process of planning the 9th grade personal narrative unit and, today, I started planning the 10th grade media literacy unit.  I’ve found a wealth of materials online and am now coming face to face with the problem of narrowing down the resources that I will be able to use for a mere three week unit.  I could teach a class on this subject.  Perhaps, someday?

One of the best resources that I’ve found, oddly enough, has been a blog published by a magazine called Stay Free!.  They describe themselves as “a Brooklyn-based magazine that explores the politics and perversions of mass media and American culture.”  The media literacy program that they provide for high school and college teachers is amazing. 

From their blog I found out about Merchants of Cool, a PBS documentary detailing how corporations try to market their products to teenagers.  I am considering showing this toward the beginning of the unit.  Another introductory activity I picked up was a Powerpoint “Alphabet” excercise found in the curriculum’s course introduction.  From this slideshow students are tested on how well they know the environment surrounding them compared to letters that they see on commercial products all the time.

On a slightly off-topic, but still related, note, I also found on their site an intriguing article by Edward Jay Epstein entitled “The Marketing of Diamonds: How a successful cartel turned a worthless rock into a priceless gem.”  Between this, the constant references to “blood diamonds” in rap songs and the new movie Blood Diamond, I am beginning to feel unforgivably and irreversably conditioned, myself.  Perhaps I can tie my impending marriage and my conflicted desires and beliefs into the unit?  Ha!

But, I am having fun designing this unit.  Just have to get back to basics.  Logic. Rhetoric. Persuasion.  Logic. Rhetoric. Persuasion.

Zodiac Characterization & First Observation

Today was a fairly hectic day for me.  My teacher days keep getting longer and longer. The girls in my carpool always joke about how we drive to school while the sun rises and we drive back in time to see it set.  It’s kind of sad having so little time before it’s time to go to bed and then do it all over again.  I’m getting used to it though.

I did survive my first observation, though.  And, I’m very pleased about that.  We just finished Romeo and Juliet yesterday, so my kids were starting off on the first step to preparing for their scenes.  Stop one was an adapted version of the What’s Your Sign? Zodiac Characterization activity that I stole from the lesson plans archive at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Instead of using the old zodiac charts that they provided I used zodiac strips as a starting point for a journal.

The had to create a character from the adjectives of their Zodiac strips.  They had the option of including information like a name, age, occupation, marital status, income, children, spouse or children’s names, hobbies, pets, etc. After they created the journals they paired up with another student, and wrote a dialog on one of three scenerios.  The scenerios were:

 1. Two peopel on a blind date are sitting in a restaurant. They have just ordered their food. There is a long, uncomfortable silence. . .

 2. Two people are waiting for a bus. One person notices that the other has been staring at him/her for a long time. . .

 3. Two people are walking their dogs in the streets of a neighborhood. One person’s dog starts growling at the other person’s much smaller dog. . .

They came up with some crazy dialogs. My favorite was a dialog created from scenerio #1:

Allen: Why are you so quiet?

Melissa: (says nothing!)

Allen: Please talk to me.

Melissa: Hi!

Allen: Are you still in school?

Melissa: Yes!

Allen: What classes are you taking?

Melissa: My major is art!

Allen: My major is math!

Melissa: Are you quick at math?

Allen: It depends on what problem you give me.

Melissa: Ok!

Allen: (To himself) I wonder if I can get her to pay for dinner tonight. Maybe I should make up an excuse to get out of here and leave her the check.

Melissa: I hope you are not bored.

Allen: No. But I got to do more math. Bye!

Melissa: What about the check?

Allen: Bye!

After the had written their dialogs, I put their transparencies up on the overhead projector and I asked them to give me adjectives to describe each character. For Allen, they told me he was “not caring,” “bored,” “rude,” “cheap,” “selfish,” and “sneaky.” Melissa was “shy” and “focused.” We looked at a few examples and then we launched off into characterization and how Shakespeare’s characterizes through dialog.

The then did some worksheets that helped them get to know their character through their character’s own actions, their character’s words and the words that other characters speak about the character in question.  It was all very fun and they seemed to enjoy it.

I think this is definitely a lesson to keep. I’m like the kids. I like any excuse to turn out half the lights.

Picture Notes

Today was the first day of my two and a half week November Unit on Romeo & Juliet.  My students are studying a prose retelling of the play and will be working, within acting companies, toward performing one scene of their choice.  Based on today’s journal responses about what they know about Shakespeare or Romeo and Juliet and whether or not they are looking forward to studying this unit, I think that it will work out all right.

I started today off with trying something called picture notes.  This class is a group of struggling readers, so I wanted to introduce them to Shakespeare in a way that goes beyond words and employs pictures, gestures and other senses.  I found the idea of using picture notes from Michelle Zoss’s article “Visual Strategies for Teaching Student’s Note-taking,” provided through TeachersBridge.  For more on how to incorporate the arts into a language and literature curriculum, Zoss cites E.W. Eisner’s “The Misunderstood Role of the Arts in Human Development,” in The Kind of Schools We Need (1998) and E.W. Eisner’s The Arts and the Creation of Mind (2002) as great print resources to consult.

To start off today’s lesson, I drew a picture summary of the events of Romeo and Juliet to use as an example for them and modeled for them how to use picture notes with a brief PowerPoint that I did on Shakespeare’s contributions to language and The Globe Theater.

The class then broke off into groups to read about different aspects of Elizabethan culture and then moved into different groups to teach each other about the aspects of Elizabethan culture in which they had become “experts.”  The jigsaw activity was fairly successful except for a goof that I made in terms of numbers.  I never claimed to be good at math.  The mess-up boggled my mind for longer than I feel comfortable admitting.

Next time I will limit my students to one or two text notes and two pictures, though.  I still had some kids who tried to copy down everything that they read on their paper and in my PowerPoint.

The Art of Inference, A Curious Incident, Indeed

So, I’ve been helping my MT with a class of struggling readers for the past month and a half, now.  I’ve been borrowing very heavily on Kylene Beers’ (who was just recently elected NCTE’s Vice President) When Students Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do.  It’s, honestly, one of the most helpful books I have come across as far as providing realistic and useful strategies for teaching low-ability or low-interest readers.  Every English teacher should have this on their bookshelf.  Since I have just sung Ms. Beers’ praises, I may as well provide a link to some of her reading strategies and lesson plans. 

This past Monday I presented a slightly modified inferencing lesson that I snagged from Beers.  I created a PowerPoint that briefly defined inference (authors imply, readers infer) and contained two images to start using inference with.  The follow-up was having students make inferences with a very short text:

 

He put down $10.00 at the window.  The woman behind the window gave $4.00.  The person next to him gave him $3.00, but he gave it back to her.  So, when they went inside, she bought him a large popcorn.

 

My first two texts were pieces of art that I thought might serve the lesson well.  The first piece was Pablo Picasso’s La Vie.  While I was preparing the presentation, it didn’t even enter my mind that nudity would be an issue with my oh so mature bunch of ninth graders. But, when my MT clicks the slide, I hear:

Giggle, giggle.

“They’re naked! Ms. P., why you showing us naked people?”

“Alright, get it out.  They are naked.”

Then one of the students pipes up, “Gosh, haven’t ya’ll ever seen a naked person before?”

 

More giggles.  For about two minutes.

 

I wonder if I’m ever going to get through this lesson.

 

When I finally do get them to start playing the game and giving me some answers, they came up with some really good inferences.  It was going fairly well when I asked a student volunteer to take everyone’s inferences and try to create a story for the painting.

 

“Well the girl on the left is the woman with the baby’s daughter.  The old woman on the right went to the store.  When her Mama gone, the girl on the left invite her boyfriend over and they start doing their thing, ya know?  Ya know, Ms. P?  They doing their thing and t    he Mama come back and she was mad, that’s why she look so mean.  The boyfriend has his hand out ‘cause he’s trying to explain.  That’s what’s happening Ms. P.”

 

Giggles.

 

I just know that I have lost control.  But, hey, check out the inferences.  So, I motion for my MT to click over to my next slide.  Surely, I can gain back some control here.  The piece was Edvard Munch’s The Scream.  No nudity here.

 

So I repeat the process and ask a volunteer to create a story from the inferences we heard.

“So, like this boy gets lost.  He gets separated from his family and he’s all alone, ‘cause in the picture he’s all alone.  And, he starts screaming because he’s retarded, too.  That’s why he’s screaming, because retarded people scream and they look like that.  Yeah, that’s what they look like, right Ms. P?”

For twenty seconds, I swore that I would never let my kids speak in class again.  Thank god, I have a more than understanding MT.