Act 3 is tricky because the scenes are long, the action is lacking, and the plot gets a tad confusing.  However, I find that this Act is crucial as many important events take place.

To make it interesting, I adapted another lesson from Shakespeare Set Free.

After reading again and summarizing the key events and character motives, I gave each of the acting companies a different objective to focus their interpretation of the text.  While each group performed, the rest of the students did a PQS.

Group 1: The Pantomime 

One student had to read the lines using tone and inflection changes for different characters, while the other students in the group had to pantomime the actions.

PQS focus:  How well does the reader change his/her inflection to convey subtext and match character motives? How well does the group’s gestures and blocking convey the subtext of the scene?

Group 2: The Fast Talkers

Students had to emphasize the rapid language of the scene, while still retaining proper inflection.  Proper blocking was used to demonstrate the confusing and constant change in character relationships.

PQS focus:  How well does the group use their voices to convey character motives? Does the blocking match the language?

Group 3: The Slapstick Actors

Students had to engage in a very physical interpretation of the scene.

PQS focus:  How well does the group’s movements match character motives?

The feedback offered during the PQS was pretty amazing.  First, students are really starting to get into Shakespeare, and feel much more comfortable with the Elizabethan English.  I’ve had a few of them tell me how excited they are for Romeo & Juliet next year.

Second, I am floored by how specific and constructive their feedback has gotten since the beginning of the year.  Without prompting, they provide concrete examples in a positive way, which makes everything they say so much more valuable. I’m seriously radiating teacher happiness with this group!!

We are going to finish the play next week  and then students will begin their performance final projects.  Exciting times!!

Students have spent a lot of time in their Acting Companies, working on understanding the themes and subtext of the play.  While this is great, I have been feeling like they have not been writing as much as I would like.

Soooo, I introduced a creative writing assignment.  The students are writing a piece of fanfiction about MSND.  Of course, the assignment was met with groans, but after the initial annoyance of another project, they started getting really creative with their ideas.

So far, we’ve done story maps, and students have just started their first drafts.

The first mini-lesson after the story maps was about starting in the action.  The students had great ideas, but were struggling how to creatively get their pieces going.  We did a few storytelling exercises, where students had to practice focusing stories for their audience to make it interesting. I think it helped.  Anyhow, Here are my two favorite gems that came from the lesson:

“Death and loneliness were surrounding him everywhere. Countless lives were lost in the most selfish and senseless way. If they hadn’t fought that day there would be hundreds of people who wouldn’t be grieving in that very moment, but Oberon was so full of himself that he just ended hundreds of lives for no good reason.”

- Valeria S.

——————————————————

“But dad!”

“No, Hermia, I will not discuss this subject anymore. You will marry Demetrius; not Lysander, and that is my final word.”

“Why don’t you let me decide my future? I love Lysander.”

“You wouldn’t understand!”

Hermia was astounded. She had never seen her father so angry before. His eyes became round and red, his expression didn’t look soothing and calm like always. Coming out of his left eye, a tear popped out.

“My dear and precious Hermia, I am sorry but I can’t allow it.”

- Veronica R.

 —————————————-

“I’ve done everything you have told me to do, I stole gold from my father’s chest and gave it to you, I had to go and kill my uncle for you, now please leave, get out of my father’s kingdom. You’ve done too much bad to Hebbitland.” Said Jaims, Oberon’s son.

“No! You forgot one thing, the powerful crystal sword. Jaims, any last words?” said Telecourt the dark lord.

“Last word? Telecourt, you never told me about the crystal sword. What are you going to do to me?”  Replied Jaims nervous.

“Dark wookies, come out! Surround that man, and when I say attack, you guys do what you do best, kill him and when you’re done, take him to my acid lake and throw him inside. ATTACK!” demanded Telecourt as millions of dark wookies come out marching with swords and machetes. – Diego F.

The next couple of lessons will involve them getting with their Author’s Circles and revising based on the exposition and rising action.

I am still on the lookout for a place for the students to publish their fanfiction.  I am leaning towards an actual fanfiction site…. Hmmmm.

Upon returning the student’s papers I asked the students to have me help them. I was frustrated with them not following directions. After all, I am well into the second semester and I needed them to realize their mistakes were nothing more then following simple directions. When I asked them what I can do to make them more successful…silence. Why couldn’t my students reflect on their own writing, or even their own work so I could help them grow?

After discussing with a colleague who had taught English before, we both came to the conclusion middle school students don’t know how to reflect on their work. My students have writing portfolios, both physical and digital. in addition, I have given them reflection prompts for their past assignments, but in all honesty I feel confident my students are more or less going through the motions rather then thinking critically about their own writing and how they can make it better. The Common Core State Standards say very little about reflection, but it is essential for creating a more rigorous classroom and for students to evaluate their own learning.

So, what can we do as middle school English teachers to help students reflect on their writing? To be honest, I don’t have any solid answers. One strategy I have adopted for my students is for them to look at a specific comment I have placed on their document. Then, they need to rewrite the comment and complete some tasks on a pre-made template I hand out to students. Below are the tasks.

1. What was your initial response to the comment by Mr. Hyler?

2. In your own words rewrite what it is that Mr.Hyler commented on.

3. Give an example of how you are going to make your writing better based on the comment by Mr. Hyler.

4. How are you going to apply what you learned from reflecting on your writing to future assignments? Be specific.

I am sure there are other ways for students to reflect on their writing. I am going to continue to research this important task that is vital for developing strong writers and strong students in general.

Cheers!

I had picked up Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide over the summer but didn’t get a chance to actually read it until this past winter break.  I am a big Gallagher fan and think he has a great approach to teaching reading and writing, especially to adolescents.   Readicide is a few years old but it hit the nail on the coffin (pun intended) in terms of how to potentially kill a love for reading in our students.  We English teachers often don’t even realize how much we are actually murdering something we truly love.  I know my eyes were widened after reading this book and am going to think very differently about how I approach teaching Literature.

What I liked most about Gallagher’s points in this book was that he gave practical advice on how to incorporate analysis and critical reading skills into a class without destroying passion for the subject.  He also does not believe in simply allowing student choice and understands that classic literature has an important place in our classrooms.  He accepts that his students won’t always “like” a book as long as they see value in it.  This is something that I have tried to embrace in my last few years of teaching.  It wasn’t always easy not to take a student’s lack of joy in a book that I loved personally, but I’m starting to break away from that (and sometimes actually find pleasure when they say they hate it – hate is a strong emotion, after all!).

One of the things that resonated most with me from the book was the acknowledgement that many of our students are extremely lacking in terms of current events and history.  This is not something we can place blame on but, in my opinion, is a part of a culture that is more focused on the entertainment world.  To counteract this issue, he brings in articles into his classroom and has students practice close reading exercises and write about the topics.  This allows the students to improve non-fiction reading skills while learning about their world to build the necessary background knowledge required for deep comprehension – such a seemingly simple idea that will greatly impact my practice and my student’s learning.

I highly recommend all of Gallagher’s work and have found practical tools that can better my own teaching in each book, but I am truly thankful that he brought up a subject that many of us English teachers are afraid to admit to: we are one of the reasons our kids hate reading.  And I know, from now on, I am going to try to change this.

During our NCTE-CEL conference presentation, we will be using excerpts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Hamlet with the following tech tools.If you are not already familiar with these tools, please peruse:

Kidblog

MIT Shakespeare

Diigolet

Wordle

Turnitin.com

Participants will have the opportunity to engage in various stages of the writing process while interacting with these tools. If you decide that you would like to engage in the writing process visit our Process-Tech! Kidblog Anyone can view the link and peruse the site, but if you would like to write along with us or post materials, choose a Username from the list that matches the number you were assigned (password is the same case-sensetive word as the Username).

If after our presentation you would like to share some of the tech tools you use in the classroom to enhance the writing process, initiate a conversation and be a contributor.

One of my favorite student lines this school year is, “Ms. Miller, will you tweet this?” As an accessible and trendy tech tool, Twitter has become an indispensable classroom utility to engage both students and their families, to check for student understanding, and to measure class progress toward language and content objectives. MillerEnglish7 has grown from a following of only 3 to 32 avid users because I have shifted the authorship from myself alone to students exclusively.

Twitter augments students’ ownership of the writing process. Some are motivated intrinsically to show their best effort when they know I will be their writing’s sole reader. I have seen, conversely, that most are motivated to do their best work when it means their work can be published for a potential audience of millions. Of course, our page following is predominantly students and their parents, but the potential breadth of readership has these scholars excited and engaged.

Students are accustomed to seeing me in class, iPhone in tow; they know that I use the phone often to document their work.  As I walk the room to confer with them, they know they should check MillerEnglish7 on Twitter to see the picture I take of their writing or what they are doing—they will be able to see themselves or their work published for the world to see. To promote viewership, I have a twitter icon laminated on my dry erase board and I list the students whose work and images are currently tweeted. Students can find pictures of themselves and their classmates engaged in a group activity, a snapshot of an exemplary journal entry, or an insightful, if not profound, comment contributed to class discussion.

The best aspect of Twitter as a classroom tech tool is its 140-character limit. For seventh graders who typically write so much to say so little, this forced size limit promotes natural student reflection. Students write an exit ticket (up to twenty words) summarizing what we learned in class. I tweet the best summaries. Students edit their writing closely to ensure it is publishable. They know that lowercase “I’s”, missed punctuation marks, and spelling errors never make it online. I will skim their journals before they leave class and take photos of the best entries. If I see a classroom majority inaccurately summarizing the day, I reflect on my own instruction to see what I could do differently to improve the lesson.

I used one of our principal’s favorite sayings to make this summarization activity effective. We had to “go slow to go fast” at the onset. Our initial Twitter summary activities took almost fifteen minutes to count words and characters in student summations. In contrast, they are not only proficient and speedy summarizers now, but I have also noticed their in-class note taking has improved as a corollary to this tech-friendly activity.

MillerEnglish7 works best when it focuses on the students. Can Twitter be used for classroom announcements, objective posting, and teacher observations? Sure. But these methods do not hook learners the way seeing their own work published might.

Another potential offshoot of this tool will be how it collects “artifacts” to present as a component of Colorado’s new teacher evaluation system.  With the advent of SB 191 (Colorado’s performance-based Educator Effectiveness Bill), I will be evaluated on the demonstration of best practices in the classroom. I will be graded as “proficient” if I can show how I do my best. I could be “advanced” if I can provide evidence of students owning their learning; MillerEnglish7 may be a resource to prove this.

I hope the number of followers on MillerEnglish7 will continue to grow. I invite students and their parents to give feedback on the teach tool features they like the most. If you happen to subscribe, please share your insights with me, too!

Carrie Miller, M.Ed is a 7th Grade Language Arts Teacher at Longs Peak Middle School in Colorado’s St. Vrain Valley School District RE 1J.  This is Carrie’s second year in public education after close to a decade working as a teacher and administrator in Independent Schools. She participated on Longs Peak’s Culture and Climate Committee and is now a member of its Leadership Team. Carrie received a National Association of Independent Schools Fellowship for Aspiring School Heads in 2009 and Oak Hill School’s Don Jackson Spirit Award in 2007 for her contribution to the school’s personal development curriculum and for boosting student enrollment by 25%. 

Email: miller_carrie@svvsd.org     Twitter: @MillerEnglish7

Yesterday, I introduced Banned Books Week to my eighth grade students by telling them that Lord of the Flies, the book we are currently reading as a class, is on the American Library Association’s list of frequently banned classics.  I asked them which aspects of the book they thought people might find objectionable, and they said the violence between the boys, the way the boys pick on each other, and what the book suggests about human nature.  When I asked them why those elements of the novel might worry some people, they said people might be concerned that students who read the book would see the characters in the book as role models and act in some of the ways that the characters do.

I then showed them John Green’s video “I am Not a Pornographer,” his funny and insightful response to some adults’ attempts to remove his novel Looking for Alaska from an eleventh grade English curriculum in the Depew School District.  I asked my students to figure out what John Green’s main points were, and they realized that a.) John Green was saying people shouldn’t assume that teenagers will read uncritically and go out and try everything they read about, and b.) Green was objecting to the fact that adults who didn’t even have children in eleventh grade in the Depew school district were trying to prevent all of the eleventh graders in the district from reading the book, whether the students and their parents were okay with the book or not.

The first point fit right into our discussion of why people might object to Lord of the Flies (in case adolescents might go out and act like the boys on the island), and the second point illuminated an important distinction, especially in a middle school class.  The thing is, there are some books that middle school students might not be ready to handle or that their parents might not be comfortable with, and that’s okay; the “freedom to read” we celebrate during Banned Books Week doesn’t mean that every reader is developmentally ready for every book.  But it does mean that young people (with the help of their parents and teachers, sometimes) should have the freedom to figure out which books they are and are not ready to read.

After we watched the video, I showed students the full list of frequently challenged classics as well as the most frequently challenged books from 2000-2009 and from 2011 so that they could take note of any books they had read and think about why people might object to those books.  (They were surprised and rather tickled to see that two more of the books we’ll read in eighth grade English, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and To Kill a Mockingbird, made the top ten for 2011.)  I will also quickly booktalk one frequently challenged book that I think students might enjoy at the beginning of each class this week.  After recommending Looking for Alaska and John Green’s other novels on Monday, I told students about Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson today.  I will booktalk The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky tomorrow (good timing with the movie out) and then The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler on Thursday.

What, if anything, are you doing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week?   What are your thoughts on how young people (and their parents and teachers) should figure out which books they are ready to read?

With that being said, on to what the students did today in class.  First, on Friday, I handed out an opt out letter for the 7th/8th graders to take home to parents to explain to them we would be using 3 social media websites throughout the year (Schoology, Twitter, Celly).  The students were instructed to take them home to share with parents what each digital tool was and how they were being used in class.  A majority of the information in the letter was what each website provides in their help and question section of their sites.  If you want to see a copy of the letter just email me and I can send it to you.  I did receive 2 of the letters back today.  I must say I am very disappointed they were returned.  I feel parents are doing their children a dis-service if they are not allowing them access school appropriate social media websites.  One of the parents even told me it was my responsibility to teach their child to write down username and passwords for these sites.  I am not one to easily get upset, but I don’t feel I am out of line when I say by 7th or 8th grade, I hope a student can write down a username and password.  Needless to say, I will need to have alternate ways for those students to complete certain assignments.

My 7th and 8th graders did some really amazing journals today.  I didn’t bring home any student examples, but I will definitely need to include them in a future post.  The 7th graders did a sort of prequel today to their “This I Believe” essay by composing a list in their journals of 15-20 beliefs.  They are going to take that list and make a wordle on Wednesday and I will then display their wordles around the classroom. Wordle is a digital tool where students can create word clouds.  Students are then going to narrow those 15-20 beliefs down to their top 5.  From there, students will narrow it down to one belief to write their “This I believe Essay”.  Tomorrows class will be spent listening and reading NPR this I believe essays.  I started to do some scaffolding with my 8th graders today by having them expand from their 6 word memoirs.  In their journals I had them write a Twitter memoir.  The students could not exceed the 140 character mark set forth by Twitter.  I didn’t mind if students went under 140 characters, but I did challenge them to be longer than just one sentence. Otherwise, I would have wound up with more six word memoirs.  Students will need to type these on Wednesday when the mobile lab is in my room and their memoir tweet along with their 6 word memoir will be put into their digital portfolio. Standard W.8.3 and W.7.3 were discussed and partially used today.

• (W.8.3) -3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.
  1. Engage and orient the reader by establishing a context and point of view and introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally and logically.
  2. Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, and reflection, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.
  3. Use a variety of transition words, phrases, and clauses to convey sequence, signal shifts from one time frame or setting to another, and show the relationships among experiences and events.
  4. Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events.
  5. Provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on the narrated experiences or events.

W.7.3 standard is not that different from W.8.3.  See the CCSS website for details.

As always my classes will keep me busy this week and I will blog about my experiences as they happen. Tweet memoirs were discovered when I read Kelly Gallagher’s  Write Like This.

Cheers!

2nd grade sports worksheet

Lets volunteer worksheet

Movie Critics worksheet

Idioms Worksheet

blank BINGO worksheet