A Good Day...simply

Today at work went well, so I thought I'd briefly share.

First, my prep period is first period. Today I had a visitor, the principal! He was doing classroom observations and stopped in unaware that I have a free period. This gave me a chance to briefly chit-chat. He made a nice comment about my room, and I took that as an opportunity to hint about my situation. I'm a first year teacher, with a first period prep(that's the crappiest prep time), I have two tenth grade classes(they are the hardest and usually go to tenured staff), and I'm a traveling teacher(we share rooms in triads at my school, I'm not in a triad so I use a different room for each of 5 periods (during other teacher's prep time). However, for these next two months I have a room (whoopie). When I finished school today, there was a note/evaluation in my box from him saying he hopes to have a room for me next semester. Cross your fingers for me...it's highly unlikely. :)

Academic success: Both my plans for tenth and eleventh grade classes went well. My tenth grade classes are about to read "Night" by Elie Wiesel. Today they got a brief biography about Wiesel's life and accomplishments. I'm using the article to teach Reading Comprehension skills via Reciprocal Teaching: Predict, Question, Clarify, Summarize. I had them copy the following (to be inserted soon) from the whiteboard, then they did a skimming practice--I'm trying to help them not only read well, but learn to pull key info out. Their homework is to read the article and answer the two "Questioning" questions. I know my tenth graders...which means tomorrow I'll be reading the article with them. :) This is also a great activity to get them excited about a book. It's not like when we were young and books made us happy quite easily.

My eleventh graders were VERY receptive to the lesson today. I must thank Nani for sharing this simple idea with me earlier this year. We are about to read "The Great Gatsby". In all honesty, I've never read it and am working on reading it now, but we need to get started as a class. I'm focusing on the obvious theme of the American Dream. They have read some first hand accounts of immigrants to the US. They have also read an article defining/discussing the American Dream. Today I took one long sentence from the novel and did a silent discussion. This is how it works: Put students in groups of 4-7, depending on time.

1. hand out the passage to each student.
2. read passage alound twice so the kids can hear it.
3. students then read the passage to themselves.
4. each student makes a question, comment, or remark in the margin of the passage. Make sure kids write #1 next to their comment. After about two minutes or when they are all done writing, students switch papers in their groups.
5. everyone reads the intial question(#1) on the sheet they now have, and they respond to that question, comment, statement, etc.
6. repeat this process until all group members have commented on all sheets
7. ask each group to "share out" at least one initial question and the responses
8. I conclude this first time doing it by stressing how much more interesting reading can be when we take the time to dive in and devour it.

All of my classes asked if we could do this again. It's such an effective method, especially with harder to understand passages, it's nice and quiet (great for rough days ;) ), and the kids are forced to use deeper thinking skills which I don't believe they get often enough.