Chance, Choice or Fate? 100 word stories

Posted in In the Classroom, Writers at Work by Literacy Love

This week I assigned my eighth grade English I students their first writing assignment – a 100 word story. Our theme for this course is “Chance, Choice, or Fate?” and I wanted students to start exploring the theme that we will come back to again and again this year. Starting off the school year with a personal narrative, and a really short one at that, is engaging and doable for my students!

This is one of the stories I have written in the past and share with my students as an example:

Taco Tuesday*

In hindsight, I had definitely used the wrong tool for the job. A three second decision had cost me a three hour visit to the emergency room. While prepping for Taco Tuesday, I decided to make my famous guacamole. Grabbing a knife from the drawer, I quickly clenched an avocado in the palm of my hand and aimed for the pit. A blood curdling scream brought my husband racing into the kitchen, only to behold the knife in my middle finger and the pit still in the avocado. I was about to get three stitches and Taco Tuesday was cancelled.**

*Titles don’t count towards the 100 words for my students, but they can if you want them to.

** Did you know that avocado hand injuries are a thing? And on the rise? Tip from a survivor? NEVER EVER google Avocado Hand Injury Images. Here’s a safe article with no gross images though to prove my point: Avocado Hand Injuries

Students turned their stories in on Google Classroom and the next day I had them share with two classmates to get feedback. It took about 10 minutes and students were happy to have the feedback before I looked at their work.

Here’s the rubric I made to grade this assignment – the language is from Ohio’s ELA standards.

Screen Shot 2017-09-04 at 3.23.41 PM

100 word stories are a great first week assignment for writers. I learned about my students’ personal lives, got some insight into their writing skills, and it is a writing assignment that can be graded in a relatively short amount of time. At the beginning of the school year, that is a huge teacher win if you ask me!!

I’d love to hear what your writers’ first writing assignment is for the school year! Please share below!

23Aug2016

Ready, Set, Go!

Posted in In the Classroom by Literacy Love

Today was the first day of my 16th year of teaching middle school English Language Arts. Even as I type this, I am in awe (and mostly horrified) at how fast the first fifteen years have flown by. This year I plan to blog more about the things happening in room 213. Easier said than done with 90+ students this year, but I have fantastic readers and writers in my Enriched Language Arts classes, and if last year was any indication, we are off to the races to do some deep thinking and learning about ourselves and our place in the world. I look forward to sharing our journey with you!

Day 1: Welcome to Room 213!

Instead of the typical first day of procedures and expectations speeches, I wanted to do something different this year. I love Ben Bache’s PBL Project Weekly Warm Ups and my seventh grade class was instantly hooked as they studied new apps of the future and created new and exciting apps that will make consumers’ lives easier and “happier”. Tomorrow students will present to small focus groups and revise their app pitches. We will then create final presentations and share in a gallery walk on Friday. As I walked around and eavesdropped on conversations taking place, there will be apps of all sorts being shared tomorrow!

My sixth grade class is brand new to the building and so I presented Adam Rex’s School’s First Day of School as a great conversation starter. I simply asked them to jot down what they noticed as I read the book to them. If you haven’t read this fantastic picture book, I hope you check it out. I love the crayon pictures! School has a rough start, but after awhile he realizes that he’s not the only one who is nervous. It’s a great mentor text for personification, too. We had a great discussion about how the author conveyed the idea of being new to a situation and it not being as scary as you thought it might be.

My two ninth grade classes were given a spelling test on the first day of school! The looks on their faces as I asked them to get out a piece of paper and number 1-30 were priceless. I used The most commonly misspelled words in every state according to Google list that has been making the rounds on social media the last few weeks. We then had a conversation about the infographic and the data it shares. It led to a great conversation!

Tomorrow my two groups of 8th graders taking 9th grade English will be working on a 100 word story using a snap shot of their summer break. Because of shortened periods and a lot of questions today, we did not get to start on them, but this is a very creative group of writers (some of whom successfully completed NaNoWriMo as 7th graders) so I know they will jump right in. Here is an example that I used from my summer vacation last year:

Taco Tuesday

How have you shaken things up and started off the school year in a unique way? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Lesley ♥

12Oct2015

In the Classroom: Inside Outside Book Interviews

Posted in In the Classroom, Reading Life by Literacy Love

This year my students are up and moving around, mind mapping and blogging on a very regular basis. We are doing Kelly Gallagher’s Reading Minute daily, collecting vocabulary words and using Corbett Harrison’s vocabulary boxes and Writers’ Notebook activities, while reading whole class novels via small book club discussion groups. Yes, we’ve been busy!

After a long week of working hard, I tried something new on Friday afternoon that was pretty successful: Inside Outside Book Interviews. These book interviews are based off of something I saw on Twitter awhile ago, but regrettably, I do not remember the source. While this activity isn’t flashy and is very low tech, students and I had a great time – it was loud, fun, and there was lots of movement. I’ve listed the activity’s steps below, and what modifications we will make next time. I hope that you’ll try it out in your classroom and let me know how it goes!

Inside Outside Book Interviews

Before starting, have students create interview questions of their choice that center around classmates’ independent reading books. (We started with 5 questions) They will take these questions and their own book to the interviews. Because students had never done this before, a lot of their questions were things like “What genre is your book?” or “Do you like it so far?”.
Divide the class in half. One group will be in the inner circle facing out, and the other half in the outer circle facing inward. Students in the inner circle have their books, while the students in the outer circle have their questions.
Explain that the outer students will be interviewing the inner students who are holding their books up during the interviews. After an agreed upon time (5 minutes) students will rotate to their next interview.
About half way through the allotted time you have for this activity, stop the interviews and have the class assess how things are going. When asked, my students said they were having fun, getting lots of book recommendations, but that a lot of the interview questions required one word answers, so their interviews were not taking very long. When I asked how we could make this activity better, students said that opened ended questions were a must and that having some back up questions were a good idea too. At this time I had the inner and outer circle switch places and start the process all over again. This time around students were asking more in depth questions and talking the entire five minutes.
At the end of the activity I congratulated all of them for doing their first round of interviews and asked for students to recognize peers that had challenging questions and/or insightful answers. This was great because the students recognized were not the ones that usually raise their hands in class. Love it when that happens!

I’ll definitely be doing these interviews again – probably once a quarter. As they evolve, we’ll work on perfecting our interview questions and how to answer without giving too much away. I’m always trying to make activities like this more fun and rewarding, so if you try these out and modify it in any way, please let me know!

Lesley ♥

17Dec2014

Our Class Blog is Live! A Call for #commentsforkids

Posted in In the Classroom by Literacy Love

My students have been blogging now for about 2 1/2 months and we finally decided to go PUBLIC. We’ve been writing reviews, bucket lists, poems, stories and working on commenting. We’d love to hear from you and your students. If you have a class blog, leave the link below and we will return the favor by commenting on your blogs, too. On behalf of my student writers, thank you!

Mrs. Mosher’s 2nd Period Blog

11Dec2014

Hour of Code – Celebrating Computer Science Education Week

Posted in In the Classroom by Literacy Love

This week we have been celebrating Computer Science Education Week in my Focus Reading Intervention classes by participating in the 2014 Hour of Code. Hour of Code is a one hour introduction to computer science that provides the opportunity for anyone to learn the basics. We spent Monday and Tuesday of this week watching a couple of short instructional videos and then exploring several really cool programs.

We started with “Code with Elsa and Anna” and it was a fantastic introduction to working with block style coding. While it was a little slow and glitchy Monday from the large numbers of students all over the world accessing it (Honestly though…what a cool problem to have!) students learned the basics of coding and moved through 20 levels of programming.

On day two, students used Scratch, Lightbot and another block style coding program for Flappy Birds. Scratch is pretty challenging for beginners, and it was fun to watch students designing their own holiday cards and animating their names. Any time 6th, 7th and 8th graders are willingly trying new things, problem solving, and working together is a definite proud teacher moment! It was one of the most animated and excited I have seen my students. I love that students can use their new knowledge of coding and work on projects outside of school. I have a couple 6th graders that are now determined to create their own apps and become Scratch experts.

Here are my awesome students showing off their Hour of Code certificates!

19Nov2014

Blogging Adventures in Room 213, Part 2 – It’s All About That Paper

Posted in In the Classroom, Reading Life, Student Blogging by Literacy Love

Please check out Part 1 of this series “Getting Started is Half the Battle”

When starting blogging in the classroom for the very first time, I found that my students have varying backgrounds when it came to the Internet, let alone blogging. As teachers who use technology every day, don’t take for granted that your students do too. Some of my eighth graders have several Tumblr pages, while others don’t know how to successfully navigate around the World Wide Web. Yes, really.

My first step was a little show and tell. I showed students this blog and used it as a “mentor text” of sorts. It was a hit. Not necessarily the content, but the actually blog? Insert high five emoji here. I showed off the main parts of a blog – title, heading of post, content of post, categories, comments, etc. You can have students point these out too.

Next I asked students to do a super quick brainstorm on what their blog’s theme would be and then do a quick pair share with their table mates. Definite student buy in at this point!! I then gave students pieces of 11 x 17 paper and asked them to design their blog using the main parts and include at least one post. They worked on it for almost a whole period and then were asked to bring it back completed in two days for our next step.

Gallery Walk time!

I love gallery walks around the room for assignments like this. When we do gallery walks, students are 1. given 3-5 post its to write positive comments on them to stick on whatever they are sharing and 2. it is silent so everyone can focus. I also mention that we should make an effort to make sure everyone has comments on their project, which seems to always happen.

I love this intro to blogging and it really helps out with formatting in the long run. It gets kids excited and ready to jump to their own space online! Next up in this series will be Part 3: Where Should We Blog?

14Nov2014

Sacred Writing Time With a Twist

Posted in Writers at Work by Literacy Love

I am a big believer in having my students write every day. Every. Single. Day. No matter what’s going on, we always make time for writing in our notebooks. At the start the year, we organized our notebooks into specific sections, made Heart Maps that captured future writing ideas, and decorated the outside of our notebooks with 5 Word Memoirs. Every month we use Corbett Harrison’s Sacred Writing Time Bingo Cards and students have a plethora of choices to pick from during writing time. I always promote student choice, but the cards are safety blankets that students can always use if they wish. Since we have been using the cards for a few months, there is now a noticeable excitement around the room when I pass them out, as students check out their options. We immediately go through each column and students star the ones they are interested in and jot down ideas in the boxes too. Hurray for writing routines!

Last week I decided to switch things up, and try something new. I chose the first chapter of The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die by April Henry as our mentor text and distributed copies of it to students. Recently having started this book myself, I was enjoying it because it is one of those books that grabs you from page 1. The first chapter starts with the female main character in a very desperate situation. She wakes up after possibly being drugged, has no idea who or where she is, or an answer to the biggest question, why there are two men trying to kill her. Major teen reader appeal!

The title of chapter one is “Day 1, 4:51 PM and when we finished reading the 4 pages, I asked students “What did you notice?” and we proceeded to discuss several things that stood out:

The title is very specific – Day 1, 4:51 PM. “This is an important detail. It was obviously done on purpose.”
The beginning sentences are noticeably short and get longer as the main character wakes up and adjusts to her surroundings. “Cool idea. It makes you want to keep reading because so many things happen so fast at the very beginning!”
The chapter ends with a MAJOR cliffhanger. “Wait! What happens next? We can’t just stop!”

Talk about insightful observations! Of course students wanted me to continue reading to find out what happens next, but I told them that it was now up to them to decide what happens. I threw out some directions – “Start the story 5 minutes, 5 hours or 1 day later and show what happens. Use suspense and descriptive details just like the author did. Go!” Students did some of their best writing of the year and after 20 minutes had gone by, hands shot up all over the place because they all wanted to share their stories. Proud teacher moment, let me tell you!

For the next week, the majority of my students continued their stories on and off during Sacred Writing Time and that is the proof that it was as successful lesson! A pro tip teacher bonus – I also had a drawing to see who got to check out the book first.

When writing activities come together as seamlessly as this one and students have FUN while working hard on pieces they are proud of – it builds community, writing skills, and an awesome story to tell all of you!

Happy writing, everyone!

♥ Lesley

29Oct2014

Blogging Adventures in Room 213 – Part 1, Getting Started is Half the Battle

Posted in In the Classroom, Student Blogging by Literacy Love

To blog or not to blog?

When I started this page a year and a half-ish ago, I’d always dreamed of having my students start blogging too. But how exactly to make that happen was a little intimidating. I talked myself out of it over and over again, telling myself it would be too much work up front, and too much to manage and keep track of, while all along, there was a tiny teacher voice in my head chanting “Do it! Do it!” You hear that nagging voice from time to time, too, I’m sure. Continually watching several teachers rave on Twitter about their students blogging was a constant reminder that I should just take the student blogging plunge. Still, I waited.

Fast forward to this past August, when I attended #edcampILECbus and sat in a session all about Kidblog, an online blogging platform designed for students and class blogs. I watched in amazement as the facilitators showed off former students’ blogs, some even from 1st graders who were clearly doing amazing work. OK, message received. I vowed to sign up for a Kidblog account and give it a try.

Why blogging?

Blogging has “cool factor” and teens are very intrigued by the idea of creating their own little corner of blogosphere. Some already have Tumblr pages so they were a little less wide eyed, but still pumped that they were now the “experts” in the room. Blogging wasn’t a tough sell, I can tell you that. From day one I kept dropping little hints about starting blogs and they had a ton of questions for me. Questions are some of the highest compliments students can give. It means they’re interested. Really interested.

I want my students to write with an authentic audience in mind. We write in our Writers’ Notebooks “on the daily” as they like to point out, but they don’t publish the majority of these shorter pieces. If their work is out there for the world to see, it is a whole different ballgame. A magnificent ballgame where i’s are capitalized, and spelling and punctuation are checked twice.

Ready, set, stop?

After setting up Kidblog accounts and passwords for my two classes – one an 8th grade inclusion ELA class, and the other a 9th grade English class for advanced 8th graders – I ran into a big bump in the road. While every student in my advanced class has computer and internet access outside of school, only about 1/3 of students in my other class do, and this class is notorious for not taking advantage of lunch and time after school for assignments. Because I don’t have a classroom set of computers, (though one can dream about it. Every.Single.Day.) I knew that some blogging would have to be completed outside of class. I have access to Chromebook carts and computer labs in my building, but once PARCC testing starts I will be lucky to get on my OWN computer during the day. While I wanted to keep high expectations for my students, the reality of requiring students to blog outside of school would probably be a big flop with one of the two classes. Time to reevaluate my plan and rethink this whole thing.

After much thought, I decided that I didn’t want to wait. Let’s do it, tiny teacher voice in my head! My new plan was this – I would start blogging with my 9th grade class and work out all the bugs with them and then bring my other class onboard slowly. If I could sell blogging to class number 1, they could help advertise it to class number 2. [Insert evil English teacher laugh here] Finally, it was time to launch blogging!

We’re officially bloggers!

We’ve been blogging for about a month now in class number 1, and while there have been bumps and pot holes along the way, it has been a welcomed addition to our classroom routines and rituals. My end goal is that after a month or two of everything running smoothly for the first class, class number 2 will soon beg to blog inside *and* outside of class and also want to stay in at lunch and after school. We’ll see how it goes.

In Part 2 of this ongoing series, I’ll talk about students’ first experiences with learning about blogs, and posting and commenting. Stay tuned, literacy lovers. We’re getting to the good part!

♥ Lesley

8Aug2014

Coming Full Circle With the Wonder of Wonder & Part 2: Julian’s Chapter

Posted in In the Classroom by Literacy Love

A little background…

During the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year, my school read Wonder by RJ Palacio for our first “One Book One School” event and promoted the book’s “Choose Kind” message all year long. Students embraced the story and it was a great experience! My students and I used this resource from the Help Readers Love Reading blog and it helped tremendously with student background knowledge and prompting discussions. I highly recommend checking both Wonder and pairing it with this blog if you haven’t already. As you can imagine, it was very exciting and rewarding to discuss and refer to Wonder with students and staff members throughout the year.

Fast forward to May….

This spring, RJ Palacio released an ebook companion to Wonder called “Julian’s Chapter”. If you haven’t read Wonder, Julian is the bully and antagonist of the story that creates a lot of trouble throughout the book. Like any good reading teacher, I kept the release to myself, as I wanted to surprise my students with it and wow, were they excited! They remembered Julian as the bully and mean kid and did not have nice things to say about him. We read “Julian’s Chapter” over the course of a little over a week (it’s a lot longer than I thought it would be) and it was a great way to end the school year. I read it with the students and didn’t preview it ahead of time. This lead to some great discussions as we found things out together.The Help Readers Love Reading blog has some great resources for Julian’s chapter, too. It’s no surprise that reading a story from the bully’s perspective is a unique opportunity and students learned a lot from this read aloud. Every story has two sides and by the end, we appreciated that Palacio gave her readers more story.

Without giving too much away, “Julian’s Chapter” gives insight into why Julian acts the way he does, his home life and how he comes to terms with what happened during his fifth grade school year. He goes to visit his grandmother in Paris and this was my favorite part of the story. His grandmother tells a story from her childhood that Julian has not heard, and it kept my students and I on the edge of our seats. Full disclosure, this part really got me choked up and there was a mad dash to get the teacher some tissues that day! Overall, revisiting RJ Palacio’s characters was a great experience, and one that I’m sure students will remember for a long, long time.

Looking back……

As an educator, it doesn’t get better than this. Through two stories, and lots of discussions over the course of 8 months, we ended the school year full circle – promoting the “Choose Kind” message with a shared reading experience that students will not soon forget.

21Apr2014

Spine Poetry in the Classroom

Posted in In the Classroom, Poetry by Literacy Love

I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for fun and pain free ways to incorporate poetry into my intervention classes. I’ve realized that Spine Poetry is a great activity for students to try their hand at making a found poem. Using someone else’s words is much less threatening than staring at a blank piece of paper and trying to fill it with your own thoughts and *gasp* feelings.

After trying out Blackout Poetry the previous week, I thought doing Spine Poetry on a Monday would be a great way to get students out of their seats and thinking critically about what they wanted their poems to say. It was an extra bonus when students discovered new books in the classroom library and checked them out, too!

Not sure what Spine Poetry is?

Step 1. Choose book spines that you want to use for your poem.

Step 2. Arrange the spines into a somewhat logical order.

Step 3. Share your poem

If you’re students need to see examples ahead of time to get some ideas, do a quick Google Image Search and voila! TONS of Spine Poetry examples.

Here are some examples from my students. I condensed them into collages, but you will get the idea. Some students work with partners while others chose to work on their own. I think the poems turned out great for their first attempt at something new.

Click on each picture to see the individual poems.