Worn Out Workshop — worries and wonders.

These past two weeks have definitely kept me busy, and I owe that to my favorite (and yet, least favorite) class activity — the workshop. The workshop is meant to keep the kids busy, keep them working, keep them learning new materials, and to get them to turn out a quality product on a [...]

Showing knowledge through peer editing

A few weeks back, Dana Huff wrote a post on Best Practices for Teaching Writing, and I’ve gotta say: I’m a sucker for teaching posts. This one is well worth the read, and I’ve definitely taken to heart the ideas she brought up in her post. And the best part is that she [...]

The ingenuity…

Every. Single. Day those kids surprise me, and this time it’s around an actual assignment I thought just might be fun. See, when I gave them the Build-Your-Own-Caste assignment, I thought they’d go and do it; that they’d complete the essay and that they’d do the presentation portion, but what I didn’t realize was [...]

So, how does this school really work?

After yesterday’s discussion about the Caste system in school, I whipped up a little handout to help the kids get their ideas flowing and in order about how the actual Caste systems that work in our schools.
Click the image below to download the handout, or click here to see the big picture.
See, the [...]

Editing without a lesson

Today we worked on how to edit a paper for clarity and correctness. But I like to do this without much instruction, and again treat it like a warm-up exercise. I read the following paragraphs (available to download, if you click the picture) to my students and asked them to find the mistakes. [...]

The Summer Session begins

You’ll notice a new header at the top of the page;something to reflect the new direction I’ll take with the summer school classes I’ll teach this summer. Don’t know how I got suckered into teaching the summer session at school, but I’m glad I did — I’ll be working with three other teachers in [...]

Never Forget

My students spent quite a bit of this semester learning about the Holocaust, and their research took them to real stories of real Holocaust survivors. In addition to watching video, exploring websites, reading plays and other documents of these events, the students delved into some pretty thorough research in an effort to make sense [...]

Why (sometimes) you’ve gotta love the way kids think

After showing off my exmple of creating a story from a list of characters, names, traits, storylines, and settings, one student came to me with just three things.
Character: A warrior
Name: Eshlyn
Trait: Conceited
And then we had the following conversation.
“I’m stuck after that.”
Why?
“I don’t know what to write.”
Ok, so…you’ve got this warrior, Eshlyn. What’s he fighting [...]

Rethinking a thought

The process of research and writing is often difficult, and it’s certainly difficult when the resourcees available to your students are limited. A colleague and I realized this and as we were talking over our future plans for the remainder of the year decidedthat we would share our classes. He — world history [...]

The workshop is working out

The troubles I was having with the workshop have kind of resolved themselves. I realized that half of the troubles I was having came form the students not having a clear enough picture of where we are heading with this project. This is a trouble that’s come up several times in the last [...]