Book reports can be so mundane and repetitive for students. These are some alternative ideas for students to write about books.
- Write a letter to one of the characters in the novel
- Write a sonnet summing up the novel
- Make a poster advertising the novel
- Put 5-10 items in a shoe box to…
Now that the “heavy lifting” months of teaching are over, what DO you do with the last few weeks of school? If you are running on fumes and in need of suggestions for wrapping up your school year on a positive note, read on for my favorite ways to make the most of the remaining class time.
Write a letter to the incoming class.
Like most teachers, my first year was spent treading water, and those last few weeks of school, I was unsure how to occupy my students without losing order. After several roundtable discussions, we mutually agreed that there were things that we wish we had known in September, as well as things we had learned about ourselves by the end of the year. I used that discussion as a springboard into a personal reflection unit that included several letters: student advice narratives to incoming students and a letter to myself noting positives and negatives about specific lessons and my instruction. I placed all of the letters in a large binder that I labeled with the school year. I shared it with my incoming classes in the fall. It has become one of the most powerful best practices in my teaching arsenal.
Create a compilation of best practices.
In addition to my letter binder, I have created a collection of lesson plans completed throughout the year. After each lesson, I jot down a few notes on a Post-it and stick it to the plan, noting what was successful and what I plan to change next time.
25 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom (by degree of difficulty)
Courtesy of Edudemic. You can download this as a PDF (it’s a large file) right here.
“Whole novel” approach to reading?
I saw this article on Education Week and it really made me think.
Class Management in the Secondary School
In Class Management in the Secondary School, Ted Wragg helps teachers to clarify their own aims and to find the strategies which will work for them. Topics covered include:*first encounters*the establishment of rules*relationships*management of time and…
Love these! Here are five as a sample:
- Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing.
- Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.
- Use writing to improve relations among students.
- Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
- Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them build vocabulary.
Here’s one idea:
Discussions in character
An effective way to use Twitter is to have students tweet in character. Let’s look at a specific example based upon Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Divide your class into groups of about five students each and have a Romeo and Juliet tweetup. Assign each group a unique hashtag (i.e. #chsenglit11 for CHS English Literature Period 1 Group 1). If you are using TodaysMeet, create a separate room for each group. Then assign each student a character from the play. Each group will be assigned the same set of characters. In our example, you will now have several groups with a Romeo, a Juliet, a Mercutio, etc. For the assignment, have the students tweet in character about important parts of the play or even tweet new scenes. A directive might be, “Tweet your character’s thoughts immediately after Juliet’s wedding gets moved to the next morning (before she drinks the poison.)” Make sure they tweet in the Shakespearean writing style! This assignment could be a one-time event or a continuous assignment throughout the entire unit of study.
