AuburnChick's Adventures

The first week after Spring Break is notoriously one of the most difficult in a teacher’s life.

The kids don’t want to be back, and the teachers, though excited, aren’t sure they are ready to be back either.

Oh, and that’s not to mention the fact that everyone has one thing on their minds…SUMMER!

I, however, was not one of these people.

I had some good lesson plans tucked into my pocket, and I was ready.

I was ready to get this last nine weeks going because I need school to be o-v-e-r so I can focus on my certification classes and be done, once and for all.

Anyhoo…

Here’s what my students saw when they walked in on Monday…

First of all, I had arranged my desk a little differently.  I like the new setup because I can see my students better if I’m sitting at that desk.  It’s also a little better for me ergonomically-speaking.

I had prepped the board for my classes…

Oh yes.  They certainly were in for a wild ride.  I had spent the latter part of Spring Break working on my lesson plans, and I felt really good about them.

Several weeks ago, I had decided to combine my 9-12 grade lesson preps.  We will, essentially, be doing the same things in those classes…on different ability levels, of course.  The thing is that the Florida Sunshine Standards are nearly identical for all of these grades!  After taking a look at what I had already covered, I selected lesson plans that would teach the remaining, untouched standards.

Hence the wild ride.

My 9th through 12th graders will be reading the book The Seventeen Second Miracle, by Jason Wright.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before.

I friended Jason, accidentally, on Facebook a few weeks ago, and he was kind enough to provide a study guide that a couple of other teachers had created (they had given him permission to do so).  If you’re looking for something like this, please contact him through his website.  He is a very nice guy who spent an afternoon exchanging emails with me.  I was very impressed.

I also developed my own lesson plans to supplement the study guide.

Every week, my classes will have assigned readings from the book.  On Wednesdays, my classes will meet during their regular class time and participate in “book club” discussions.  They’ll have to bring in the reflective journals they did for the week, in which they will have written about seventeen-second miracles others did for them and they did for others that week.  I think the discussions are going to be very interesting.

What I’m most excited about is the large project they will complete at the end of the term for this book.

It’s two parts.  Each student will write a short character analysis that will include a paragraph about how they identify with their chosen characters.  The paper will count for 1/4 of their project grade.  The remaining part will encompass a video project!!!

I divided the students into groups of three and four.  The video project will have to show everyday things that take seventeen seconds.  Then, the video will have to take on story form as the kids show how one “miracle” can have the snowball affect of changing a minimum of four people’s lives.  I’ve given them storyboard templates and a lot of other information to help them.

I am really excited to see how this plays out for them.  The message in this book is incredible.  It’s about how it takes very little time to change a person’s life, but we have to make a purposeful decision to step outside of our comfort zone, be willing to inconvenience ourselves, and then just do it.

Those lesson plans are going to be running in the background, so to speak, while we do other stuff…

Like write technical manuals, which is the current project.

Students are writing how-to manuals about two or three features of a regular household item.  They will be writing the steps, conducting useability tests, and then revising their instructions.  Their final drafts will have to include pictures, just like any good manual would.

Meanwhile, my 6th graders started a new routine this term.  I decided to incorporate Silent Sustained Reading for the first ten minutes of class.  Students are required to bring novels of some sort to class to read for the first ten minutes.  They LOVE this!!  I told them that they could consider this part of their 30-minute required reading time that they have to log for my class each day, which made them love it even more.  🙂

This week, my 6th graders began reading about Yellowstone’s summer fires of 1988.  I gave my students new workbooks that contained this story along with a host of other stories we will be reading this term.  They were so excited because the books were new, they can write in them, and they can even highlight in them.

It doesn’t take much to make kids happy, I’ll tell you!

All-in-all, it was a very good week.

Something I realized this week is that good lesson planning is key to keeping kids motivated and excited to learn.  It’s also refreshing to be excited to TEACH a lesson plan that I actually believe in.  I’m stepping outside of the box with some of my lesson plans this term.

I think that teachers need to be careful not to get stuck in a rut.  If we’re stuck as teachers, we can bet that students are stuck as well.

Changing things up takes so much time and energy, but the kids respond so positively that teachers can’t help but feed off of that energy.

I figured out that little things like turning the desks in a different direction also helps get kids out of their rut…

So, week 30 was very good indeed!!

Filed under: Teaching | Tagged: teaching |