Week 20 was short, thank goodness. I think it was nice to ease back into the routine.
My juniors and seniors shifted gears this term. Instead of studying American literature, we will now be studying British literature. I decided to change it up because next year’s seniors will not take high school English, and I wanted them to get a taste of something different. Plus, I simply could not allow them to graduate from high school without studying some wonderful British prose.
After studying the state of Florida’s benchmarks, I realized that we needed to work on Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes. So, four of my classes will concentrate on them this term. I will work with my sixth graders on them next term.
Here’s what my first two class periods saw when they came in to class on Wednesday…
To make life a little easier, I decided to combine the preps for my ninth and tenth graders. Both classes will be reading and studying Romeo and Juliet.
My sixth graders will be reading stories and poems that correspond with the theme “What Makes You Who You Are.”
Thursday arrived, and I was ready…
I spent the majority of Wednesday and Thursday introducing British literature and the Dark Ages/Medieval times. It was actually very interesting (although my seniors were about to fall asleep in class…gotta love that 8am call time). This change is allowing me to entertain the history lover inside of me.
The ninth and tenth graders were getting a solid foundation in Shakespearean drama along with a synopsis of early British history. I’ve gotta tell you that I did not originally plan on making the four classes’ lessons go hand-in-hand like that. What a blessing!
My sixth graders read a story called “Eleven.” It was really cute, and I assigned them the task of making cartoon strips. They loved this! In fact, while they worked on them in class, it got too quiet, so I decided to turn on some music…very low. They perked up and asked me to turn up the volume. I told them that I didn’t want the other people (those outside the door) to think we were having fun.
The response? “But we are having fun!”
Priceless!
It made for a great day.
And then there was Friday…yay!
My juniors and seniors read a Time article that compared and contrasted each age’s idea of heroes. The article was interesting and offered a lot of discussion topics. I assigned my students the task of making time lines to help them visualize the different time periods and the differing philosophies.
I surprised the ninth and tenth graders with a pop quiz from the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet. Honestly, if they had been paying attention to the discussion the day before, they would have gotten all of the questions correct.
One fun thing I assigned these two classes was the making of family shields. I found an awesome idea online (wish I could take credit for it myself). Basically, I had the students pick from a handful of slips of paper. If they pulled a “C,” they would be in the Capulet family…vice versa for the Montague (pulling out an M).
I instructed each group to select two family colors for their shields. They had other required elements to add to their shields, which are due on Monday.
We’re going to treat this like a little rivalry. The groups will be in competition with each other during our study of the play. Groups can earn or lose points for various things such as good grades on assignments, turning in assignments late, bad behavior, and such. If a group gets to -5 points, the family can banish a family member – much as Romeo was banished after killing Tybalt.
The goal, by the end, is to have the least number of family members banished.
My ninth graders wanted to know what kind of reward they would get. I left it up to them.
They are desperate for a party. We haven’t had one yet. As you know, it’s my toughest class.
So, I agreed. A party it will be. The deal is that the losing group has to provide the food for the party.
One neat thing I also did was allow my tenth graders to participate in this game. There are only two students in that class, and there is not a lot of group work and projects I can do…especially because there is one girl and one guy, and co-mingling is not encouraged in Islam. So, one of the students became a Capulet, and the other became a Montague. This will help the other class as both of these kids are excellent students and never get in trouble (it’s kind of hard to when there’s only two of you).
And so Week 20 is in the books.
The rest of the year is going to be very, very interesting as I try to balance teaching with my certification classes.
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