As part of the Investigative Journalism unit we are currently exploring, Mrs. Shaffer and I wanted to be sure that the students were understanding what the daily learning objectives were. Our students have been writing A LOT - three news articles with revisions and daily discussions with writing partners. Today, the students' task was to take one of the news articles to "final copy" in our Google Classroom. Before writing though, we asked the students to brainstorm what should be included on the rubric for grading. In order to do that, students discussed and debated in small groups what the news articles had to include. Students created a rubric in small groups that encompassed all the mini-lessons that had been introduced to them in the unit - the learning objectives based on our Dublin learning standards. The conversations were amazing! Students were able to state clearly what they had learned, and they knew exactly what the teachers were going to grade them on. As a large group, we put the ideas together into a class rubric. Another excellent day in 8th grade language arts! As part of our writing exploration this year, we began using writing partners. In order for students to receive feedback from someone other than the teachers, students chose a colleague in their class to work with over the next few weeks. The directions were to chose a person they believed would help them become a better writer.
Partners shared their first news article with their peer and talked about the positives and also gave suggestions to make the writing better. On Friday, the partners traveled together to observe and take notes on the happenings at Grizzell Middle School. After observing, the partners shared their findings and discussed what was worthy to explore as a news article. Over the weekend, each student will write their article and share in class with their writing partner on Monday. One mini-lesson next week will be about giving feedback to peers. We want to be sure that writing partners are not editors! The purpose of the partnership is to give feedback about writer's craft, content, voice, and organization - not grammar or mechanics. In the two days that the writing partners have worked together, we have heard some amazing conversations! We will keep you posted about the process over the next few weeks. Last year we offered students the opportunity to participate in "Challenge Book Clubs". Each month two books were offered as "challenge" titles for students to read independently. We met one Friday each month to eat pizza and talk about the books that were read. Participation varied from month to month although we did have four students participate every month! Some titles included: The Book Thief, Call of the Wild, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This year, the Challenge Book Clubs are back! The first two titles for November are The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak and The Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow. While choosing titles, we try to appeal to all types of readers, and we feel that these two titles do that. Everyone in eighth grade is invited to participate! We've also added a second opportunity for challenge - Word Warriors! After working on sentence structure, several students seemed intrigued and interested in how clauses, phrases, and grammar works (in more detail than we'll go into in class). We also know that our students are just a few years away from SAT and ACT tests, and vocabulary is often a struggle on those tests. Word Warriors will meet twice a month to work on challenging topics regarding words: analogies, using context, word families, sentence structure, parts of speech, etc. We are so excited to try this challenge club, and of course, everyone is invited to join us!
Since Rita and I have the luxury of team teaching, we used that opportunity to work with small groups on sentence structure and other grammar skills this week. We administered a pre-assessment (after a flipped lesson on sentence structure) and used the data from the pre-assessment to put students into groups based on their knowledge.
Rita worked with students who needed a refresher on run-on sentences and sentence fragments. It was a two day process that obviously helped the students because the results from today's post-assessment were very good. While Rita worked with that group, I read with a small, self-selected group of students reading picture books that pertain to the Holocaust. There are so many excellent picture books that help build background knowledge about the Holocaust and that help develop empathy for the time period. I read The Butterfly by Patricia Polacco, Terrible Things by Eve Bunting, and The Cats of Krasinski Square by Karen Hesse. Each period we talked about the books and what we noticed about the writer's craft. Today, I worked with a small group of students in each class on the four sentence structures, while Rita finished up with her group on fragments and run-ons. The students who weren't in either group, read independently - most of whom chose Holocaust or World War II books to build even more background knowledge about the time period. I was pleased with how the small group instruction went this week. It takes a lot of preparation, thinking and planning to make this type of instruction work, but it is something that Rita and I are committed to doing. Using the workshop model for both reading and writing instruction is vital to our 8th grade classroom. I have had Evernote on my iPad for about three years - yes, my iPad is an original. I believe I downloaded the app during Dublin Leadership Academy because one of my colleagues, probably Franki Sibberson, tweeted about it. I have Evernote on my phone too, but I've never used it to take notes. I have opened the app on occasion, but that's about it. This week, Rita and I dove into Evernote with reckless abandon. We have been looking for a way to collaboratively share reading and writing conference notes. Last year, we tried Google Drive, but that didn't last long. Since we team teach and try to conference with every student in the room as often as possible, we were trying to figure out the best way to document the interactions so that we could share easily with each other. Evernote seems to be the tool that will work for us this year. This week we've been having one-on-one reading conferences during independent reading time. It is a quick and easy way to share the interactions we have with students. I can't wait to see what each students' "note" looks like by the end of the year. After participating in a Twitter chat called #dubchat, Mrs. Shaffer and I are trying to beef up our use of the 8th grade ELA Twitter feed. In class yesterday, we finished reading Freak the Mighty, the whole school read aloud. Every students' task was to create a tweet (140 characters or less) about the book or their feelings regarding the book. Today, everyone shared his/her tweet and the class voted on the best one to represent each class period. The winners were:
1st period: Dad's back. Max gets sacked. Freak dies. Max cries. #freakthemighty (created by Ashley R.) 2nd period: Just read #freakthemighty. @MaxPerry calls it a must read! Sad ending though. (created by Max P.) 3rd period: That awkward moment when your dad comes and kidnaps you, though it makes for a heck of a story. #freakthemighty (created by Anna M.) 6th period: #freakthemighty The ending is so sad. Poor Max. Kevin was his anchor and now he is drifting away. (created by Nithya V.) 7th period: Freak's dictionary > your dictionary. #freakthemighty (created by Luke M.) The tweets were sent out after each class, so hopefully, if you follow our class, you received them. In case you haven't jumped on the Grizzell 8th grade ELA twitter feed, you can follow us: @Grizzell8ELA More Twitter fun to follow! -Mrs. Honeycutt Last week we watched a video by John Green about the purpose of public education. The overall message of this video is a reminder to us of why we are here every day - "let's be 'less stupid together'". After watching the video the students shared with their class why they are here and what they hope to accomplish at school everyday.
On Friday, we asked students to brainstorm what must happen in a productive, large learning community like ours. The list that each class came up with was impressive! Using Wordle, we put the thinking into the poster on the right. This will hang in our classroom as a reminder of what each students' job is every day in the class. According to our 8th graders, our ELA learning community must have:
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January 2015
AuthorsBeth Honeycutt is an avid reader and loves to work with middle school students. Writing and publishing a blog is a new, but exciting endeavor for her. |