A couple of you asked how my second day of school went. Well, I thought I would give an update on the second week.
We began studying story elements, and I spent the majority of the week on “setting.” The first couple of days were alright, but I could see that my students were bored. Some were trying to sleep. With 90-minute class blocks, the time can drag by. It’s a teacher’s responsibility to keep the activities relevant and motivational.
I decided to step outside of the box a bit. Before I got hired, the reading team had created a lesson study. Basically, they planned out first six weeks of our classes. This was good for me because I have been overwhelmed with the vast amount of things I have to learn during my transition to the public school system.
However, some of the activities have not been very interesting to my students.
One of the things I did to stress the importance of setting to a story was to cut out pictures from magazines. I used one of them to model the exercise I was going to have my students complete on their own.
I taped the picture (after walking around and showing it to my students) to the board, and we wrote a story…incorporating the setting into our story.
Each class period wrote a completely different story because, of course, the students provided different ideas.
Here’s what my board looked like after one of my classes…
Next, I gave students their own pictures and paper. They glued the pictures to the paper and began writing their stories, ensuring that they included all of the components of setting…time, place, environment, and mood. I wound up using this as a summative assessment (I let the kids double-check their stories the next day to ensure they had included everything since they had not been given a heads up ahead of time). This activity had followed a week of lessons, including a fun session of analyzing an excerpt from The Fall of the House of Usher. Believe it or not, my students really enjoyed this dark Edgar Allen Poe bit of prose.
This week, I was reminded of how important it is to get the kids up and moving…conversing not only with me but with each other…about reading stuff, that is. 😉
Once I stepped outside of the box with my plans (i.e. visited the internet and did my own homework), they responded much better and tried to sleep less often.
It also helped when I got very strict in my classroom management. Interestingly enough, managing 24 students is almost easier than the six I had in one particular class last year.
I am learning about my students’ various interests and connecting with them through those interests. I LOVE seeing eyes light up when I ask specific questions or make comments that they can genuinely appreciate.
I ended the week by attending part of my school’s home game on Friday night. Now, my students know that Rooster is attending Podunk High School…an in-town rival…so it meant a lot for them to see me wearing my school t-shirt yesterday and to hear that I would be attending the game.
I explained that the moment they step into my classroom, they become my children. I feel a sense of ownership. Thus, I want to support them in their endeavors. I want my students to know that I genuinely care about them…first as, to put it simply, human beings. I care tremendously about their academic successes as well.
It was a great second week of school!
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