We've Gone On-line!

We've moved into the 21st century!
Students were introduced to our on-line class site http://spaulding.edu20.org/ and most were able to join Freshman English on-line today. Although we continue to run into wireless access issues within our classroom, students can (and should) visit this site often from home or in some cases their phone!!! For students with limited computer or internet access, time to use computers in class will be given on a weekly (if not more) basis to complete their work. Students can also use computers in the library (7:30 to 3:30) or computer lab (7:30-3:00) before and after school.
BE AWARE! Students will need to go on-line frequently to complete out-of-class assignments, participate in class forums, wikis, book groups, and more. Students can access resources, our calendar, and the areas necessary to complete assignments with easem, so encourage your student to practice their 21st Century Learning skills by visiting our class on-line!

Using Protocols: Reflections

As a lover of dialogue, one of my teaching goals is to assist students in "finding their voice" through facilitated discussion. As we all know, some of us have a more difficult time speaking up and out when it comes to discussion. Some of us are simply more shy than others, more unsure in our opinions than others, or more hesitant to share than others. To allow each student opportunity to share their voice within discussion, students use protocols to explore topics, readings, reactions, and ideas. Protocols are structured ways to effectively discuss ideas. Most of the protocols in use come from School Reform Initiative (http://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/); and, as necessary some protocols have been modified to fit our learning community needs. Using protocols to explore ideas, questions, and text, also drives students to work collaboratively and experience more of a "real world" practice since protocols are used throughout the professional world.

Here are student's thoughts on using protocols within our course work:

The Last Two Weeks

For the last two weeks students have been continuing to explore who they are and why they do what they do. We'll continue this investigation on a weekly basis as we finish reading the book Life Strategies for Teens by Jay McGraw. We've also begun to connect this investigation with goal setting and the Habits of Mind. Students have formulated and workshoped writing S.M.A.R.T. goals and will soon decide what reading, writing, and personal goals they want to work toward. These goals will be posted in class, and students will work with strategies to make their aspirations reality, monitor their progress, and formulate new goals with each successful gain. With a little more work, the connections between the Life Laws within Life Strategies for Teens, the Habits of Mind, and personal growth should be apparent. I've been asking students to dig deep and be critical of themselves as well as open minded. I've seen lots of honest reflection and processing as a result. So...Ask your student about what we've reflected on in class, what he or she has discovered about our group, what he or she has discovered about himself or herself, and general reactions to the text.

Poetry is..

Students will be exploring poetry weekly on Mondays and Fridays. To start of our unit work, I asked students what they thought poetry was. Next, I had students listen to a few poets (adults and students) read their work. At the conclusion of the lesson, I asked students to reflect again on what poetry was. Here are their responses:

Poetry is…

Rhyming stories…A different way of saying things…A way to tell stories…Spoken…Mixes rhyming and telling how you feel about something…Is short writing…Something you can write anytime…Is only one page…
Comes in many different forms…Is the grouping of words…Is words broken by space and commas…Stuff that rhymes…A way to express your feelings in different ways…A way to not be bottled up…Can be about anything you want it to be…Is a graceful way to express yourself…Expresses your feeling without speaking…
A way to creatively express yourself…A bunch of phrases that come together to make a story…Words that flow together to make things seem clam or angry…Anything you want it to be…Words that describe feelings…
About anything—nature, lives, people…Is not like a story but is...Describe things in life…A romantic way to explain feelings…A way to make things interesting…A way to let your feelings out…A place to be yourself…Sentences with a lot of power to them…Expressing yourself through words and forms…Something you’ve experienced…Writing that can be a song…A variety of feelings…Creative writing with meaning, feeling and sometimes symbolism…A kind of writing…What you feel and see…Taking a story and bending it into new words to make it new…Is descriptive words…Is art…Is a story in lines or little paragraphs…Doesn’t have to rhyme…Sometimes pointless…A way to express you you are feeling without really saying it…A way to share thoughts and opinions…Thoughtful words put together...Short and deep…Ideas that relate to each other…a song before it is a song…Weird…abut random things…Funny…Really unique…Patterns in writing with words...
Something I like to write...A part of who I am