More Atwell

In Atwell’s In The Middle, there are obviously a lot of things that I can use to help teach my students. Her chapter on Minilessons in the Writing and Reading Workshop section I found to be very useful. I especially liked that she listed “Procedures for Standardized Reading Tests” as a minilesson. This would be a great minilesson to teach in correlation with the Ohio Graduation Test. Atwell says that “students and I look at selections and questions from old state and S.R.A. tests and analyze how they’re constructed. In another minilesson I teach procedures for reading the test passages and answering the questions…” (page 213). She then has procedures for standardized reading tests, the first one being “Read the first couple of sentences, the last couple of sentences, and the questions. This way you’ll have an idea of what you’ll be reading about, plus what you’ll be asked to decide about this passage.” This is a very important tip to give students because it will save them precious time on the OGT.

Some of these tips, like the process of elimination procedure, are things that my teacher Mr. Youel has talked to his classes about in preparing them for the OGT. He always tells them that there are usually two answers to a multiple choice that are completely wrong and can be thrown out immediately, one answer that is close to being correct but that is not quite right, and one answer that is absolutely correct. I think that giving students practice and tips for standardized tests is a wonderful idea because their OGT scores will reflect upon your teaching, which makes it very important that your students perform well.

New TV show!

I started watching a new show on HBO called Boardwalk Empire which airs on Sunday nights at 9PM. It takes place in Atlantic City in 1920, when women are just getting the right to vote and the prohibition of alcohol began. There are a lot of thugs and gangsters portrayed in the show, one being Al Capone, and some are dealing alcohol illegally. The show is definitely for a mature audience, with breasts being shown in nearly every scene…but I really like how different the show is from anything else that I watch. I never really watch any shows or movies that are set in such a different era, and it’s interesting to see a little bit of America’s history mixed into the show.

Pleasure Reading

A couple weeks ago, I started reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. My roommate told me it was a really good book so I decided it was finally time that I got around to reading it. So far it’s a real page-turner, which is why I love mystery/thriller books. I’m almost halfway through the book, where Sophie Neveu has discovered a key her grandfather left her from his mysterious past. She and Robert Langdon are fleeing the Louvre in Paris and are headed toward the US Embassy. I’m interested to see how the rest of the book pans out.

This probably isn’t something I would use in my classroom, simply because there’s a lot of religion in it, and it may be too confusing for the students. As I researched it online, I found that many Christians are in upheaval about the portrayal of Catholicism in the book, saying it is an attack on the Roman Catholic Church. Apparently, the book has also been criticized for scientific and historical inaccuracy. It’s pretty long but I should be able to finish The Da Vinci Code in a few weeks, as long as I can continue to squeeze in some time to read it!

Writing Journals

I was reading Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle and learned that “When students have regular, frequent time set aside to write, writing can also play a crucial role in helping them grow up, making it possible for them to capture who they are, then come back and measure themselves against their earlier selves” (page 93). I think this is a really good point, and is all the more reason why I should use some sort of writing journal in my class. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be a daily journal, but even if I had students write in their writing journals once or twice a week, it would be helpful. That way, the kids can feel free to write about whatever they’d like to write about, which in turn will hopefully make them enjoy writing more. I could either have the kids write in their own personal journals or create the topic journals we made on one of the first days of class, where there are dozens of notebooks and each has its own topic such as food, fashion, cars, nature, etc. Either method will allow the students to practice their writing skills throughout the year.

Stumble Upon

I was surfing the web today and decided to sign up for a StumbleUpon.com account because my brother was telling me how addicting it is. The website is free and is really neat! I would really recommend it to anyone, but in regards to teaching, there are some great tools that you can “stumble” across. When you sign up for an account, you can choose from hundreds of topics that you find interesting by checking off the topics you’d like to find websites for. Some of the topics I chose include literature, poetry, writing, graphic design, humor, books, multimedia, recipes, photography, and many more. I’ve found a few good resources so far and hope to find more great ideas through this website. All you have to do is click “stumble” and the site will automatically bring up a new website related to any of the topics you’ve chosen. Here are some websites I came across that I can most likely use in the future:

http://www.languageisavirus.com – creative writing games, how to cure writer’s block, writing prompts, poetry, and more!

http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/assign/e50xs2.htm –creative writing exercises

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/fifty-50-tools-which-can-help-you-in-writing.html – 50 tools that can help you in writing

I also found something that I will probably use to kick-off my ten day unit on commas and punctuation:

Back to Blogging!

I guess I really haven’t blogged since Multi-Modal! So here’s a refresher as to what’s going on. I am placed at Field High School in Mogadore for student teaching. My teacher, Mr. Youel, seems really cool. He’s the head football coach at Field and the students really like him, according to the principal. He’s loud and likes to joke around but has great classroom management and keeps the kids on-task. Right now he’s teaching Honors English 9 and “regular” English 10. This spring he’ll pick up a speech class, too. The kids start off by reading Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, and then they’ll move to short stories for a while.

I’m really excited to finally be in a classroom and have a steady, consistent field experience…but most of all, I’m excited to get comfortable in the classroom and start teaching and getting to know my students. I’ve already got textbooks from Mr. Youel, and he was lucky enough to have teacher editions for me to use. They are brand new Holt Rinehart and Winston books, and I’ve posted links to their websites:

http://eolit.hrw.com/hlla/

http://go.hrw.com/eolang/

Mr. Youel also let me know that in the Spring I’ll most likely be teaching Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar and will have a choice of four different short stories I can teach as well. I’m very excited for this opportunity and hope that my experience allows me to gain a lot of knowledge about teaching. With 15 credit hours and all of this classroom time, it will make for a challenging but worthwhile semester!