Blackout Poetry

I’ve spent even more time on Pinterest lately (which is quite impressive) compiling a list of activities that I would like to try in my classroom in the future. I have been especially focused on poetry because I. Hate. Poetry. I have never enjoyed learning about--and did not expect to enjoy teaching--poetry, so I wanted to find some extra fun and stimulating activities to get both my students and myself involved. As always, Pinterest did not disappoint, and I discovered an activity that I cannot wait to try: Blackout Poetry!

You can read the article that I found and check out some really awesome examples of student work here: http://thedaringenglishteacher.blogspot.com/2017/04/make-poetry-fun-with-blackout-poetry.html

I have outlined the steps for this activity below:

1.     Students choose one page from a novel or short story that has been covered in class over the course of the school year. The passage should be meaningful to the student in some way.

2.     They then choose a handful of words (you can’t choose to many or too few) that stand out to them from the passage.

3.     Next students begin to “black out” or color over the rest of the text in a black marker so that the words that stood out to them (and likely a few more for the sake of making the poem make sense) are the only visible words. The students are encouraged to create images or patterns while blacking out the text, and they may be as creative as they would like.

4.     Students then write a short response to answer each of the following questions: Why did you choose you passage? How is it meaningful to you? Why did you choose the specific words that you did? What made them stand out? What does your poem mean to you? Explain the visual elements of the project.

5.     Once the above steps are complete the students present their poems/artwork to the class and use the short response questions above to structure a 2-3 minute presentation of their project.

I love this project because it allows students to be creative, ties in previous texts, requires the students to choose meaningful passages/words and to think critically about them, and allows them to practice their public speaking skills! I would definitely be excited to teach this poetry lesson!

In Response to Nate's ACT Prep Post

I found Nate's post about ACT prep at his school to be quite interesting. He seemed to be arguing that the program his school uses, the John Baylor Program, is an effective one, but students don't seem to take it seriously. I'm not familiar with this program, nor do I know anything about it. But, I believe as educators it is our job to make sure that the ACT prep works. Students will, of course, not take something seriously that we do not help them see the importance of. 

In my own internship, I have heard other people in the professional community say that they feel the students are over prepped for the ACT, leaving them exhausted and uninterested in the whole matter before the actual exam is ever delivered. I could certainly see this being the case. Students are prepped and given practice tests multiple times throughout the year, and by the time they take the actual exam in the spring, they have lost interest and are tired of trying. 

So what could combat this? Perhaps there is less importance on which particular ACT prep program is used, and there is more importance on how the prep is delivered. Perhaps the students should not be tested quite so much leading up to the actual exam? I believe that if educators spent less time practice testing and more time simply teaching students what they need to know for the exam, they might have better results. Perhaps one practice exam before the real exam would be enough to show the students what to expect without tiring them of the entire matter. 

Are high school students sometimes lazy? Yes. Do they sometimes take ACT prep less seriously than they should? Yes. But, we adults are guilty of the same -- everyone is. Therefore, knowing human nature, it would seem that educators ought to not worry so much about which fancy ACT prep program they use, and more about how they use it. 

Is ACT prep really helping?

Typically I am all for using techniques and programs that will help students prepare for their futures. However, the school I am at for my fall teaching internship is using the John Baylor Prep programs, and I am finding, as a teacher in the field, that it would be much more effective if students would take the prep program seriously.

I have heard from the bulk of my students that they don't really try when we do JB Prep. For the month of October, we set aside 3 weeks worth of Thursday/Friday combinations for the ACT preparation program. As a whole, it seems as though the students are burned out on standardized test taking. This is my main issue with the whole thing. It seems like a rather large price to pay for a program that students will do because they are told to and not because they see the value that such programs hold.

After reviewing the program myself, I think that the way John Baylor teaches students to approach the ACT is helpful. He provides tips on taking the test that will help students earn at least a 20 on the ACT. He breaks down the sub tests in a manner that help students better understand how to take the tests and understand the material that they will be tested over.

Overall, this is a great program that my school is choosing to use. The effectiveness, however, will be gauged by how well students perform on the next ACT test they take, which may not be at all for some of my students. If students would take a more serious approach to this preparation, I wouldn't see this as much of an issue. That being said, I think there needs to be a reevaluation of this method's effectiveness before the school renews its license to use this prep system.

Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles

I LOVE to read, and it makes me super excited to think that I can influence how my students feel about reading! I learned a lot of simple strategies and activities in the “Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles” reading that I would like to implement in my classroom to hopefully encourage students to become active, interested readers!

Book Pass: I always hated when high school teachers assigned the entire class the same book to read because it always ended up with half the class hating the book and therefore not contributing to class discussion and activities. I really like the idea of allowing students to choose books that they really enjoy and can connect with, and a book pass is the perfect way to showcase all of their options because most high school aged kids do not know how to choose a good book (many go by the pictures on the cover, the paragraph on the back, etc.). I also think that having students fill out book review sheets for each book they preview is an excellent idea! I 110% want to have groups of students reading different books throughout the school year and I think a book pass would help to start the routine!

Drawing: For me, the most captivating part of reading a book is the stream of images that flash through my mind as I read. Therefore, I think that encouraging students to draw their thoughts about a book rather than write about them could drastically change how much they enjoy reading and analyzing texts. I liked the idea of modeling a “draw-aloud” to familiarize the students with the process, and I love that the reading offers additional avenues of visual expression than just pictures such as patterns, abstract things that represent a feeling/character/situation, a diagram/flow chart/story map, images from your life that the text reminded you of. The options are endless!

Save the Last Word for Me: Wow! I’ve never thought about this before, but the example in the reading where the teacher explains why he/she chose a passage first and then asks for student feedback really stood out to me. The students think that the teacher already explained the right answer, so they completely shut down and do not offer any additional ideas. This can happen not only when choosing a passage, but at any time in class! This section of the reading really intrigued me because it showed how strongly teachers’ can unknowingly keep their students from contributing to class and shutting down their ideas. I love the idea of “Save the Last Word for Me” in all aspects of class discussion so that students can first give their ideas without being made to feel like their answers are incorrect.

The Power of Reflection

As I sat grading 9 weeks tests this weekend, I saw another clear reason to reflect on my teaching, especially in using assessments to determine what students still struggle with. My test consisted of two components: 1) Writing a memoir with fictional aspects (80% of the grade) and 2) multiple choice questions related to the material covered in class (20% of the grade).

Since we have covered MLA a couple of times over the course of the 9 weeks, I figured students would have no issues answering a couple of questions about the structure of citations they have frequently used and works cited pages they have frequently created. However, I was incorrect. The multiple choice was low-stress, so I'm not sure whether to attribute that to sheer lack of focus or if students genuinely had a difficult time with it. That being said, I'll probably review that before too long.

Another thing that my students really struggle with are the use of commas. They do not seem to understand when they should use them. I would expect to see students using commas unnecessarily as well as using them too little. Again, I'm incorrect. I am in the process of creating an instructional activity to use to teach them how and when to use commas. I'm absolutely open to suggestion on this.

These two things are just a couple of examples of things I've noticed while reviewing the results of the nine weeks tests. As a pre-service teacher, I have been increasingly conscious of the need for constant reflection. In the near future, I will be acting on the results of my reflections. More to follow soon.

Reading Like a Writer

I started reading “Live Writing: Breathing Life into Your Words” by Ralph Fletcher (the book we all got in our last class), and I already learned something really cool by the time I finished chapter two. Chapter two is titled “Reading like a Writer” and it proposes an idea that I never really considered before now. I would like to share some of the main points the chapter makes in hopes that it will enlighten each of you as it did me.

·       Most people read a fantastic book/poem/short story and think “That is so good! I could never write like that, no matter how hard I tried!”

·       The typical reader reads either 1) for entertainment, or 2) for information

·       Most readers focus on what is going to happen next in the story

·       A writer, on the other hand, reads to discover how the author created a specific effect

·       A writer will read a terrific piece of text multiple times to uncover author choices such as word choice, word length, sentence type, sentence length, point of view, the use of adjectives/adverbs, etc. They will then attempt to determine how the combination of these factors creates a specific tone or emotion.

The author provided an excellent example that I want to share for lack of a better way to explain the process, and because I think this example would translate well when explaining how to read like a writer to students!

Reading like a writer is like watching a magic act. The magician throws a piece of cloth over an empty hat, waves his hands around, and whips the cloth off to reveal a fluffy, white rabbit perched inside the top hat. Our first reaction is “Wow! That was so cool!” Our second thought quickly pops up, “How did he do that?” Within seconds we usually say, “Wait! Do it again so I can figure out how to do it myself!” This mimics the reading like a writer process perfectly, and shows that re-reading a text is essential in the process!

Journaling

I was intrigued after our last class with journaling every day as bell-work. In high school, I never had a consistent type of bell-work presented in any class, and they were only assigned sporadically with no reliable pattern established at any point in the school year. I think that bell-work sets the tone for the class and serves to put the students into an English-centered way of thinking. SO I looked a little deeper into journaling daily for bell-work and I found an awesome resource I would like to share!

On Teachers Pay Teachers, I found a bell-work journal with prompts that last the entire school year. The prompts cover various types of writing including responses in the form of letters, journal entries, poems, bulleted lists, paragraphs, pictures, and social media posts. Sadly, it’s not free… but it is cheap ($16) considering how much you’re getting with the product. The packet is organized by month with twenty-five worksheets per month (275 total)  and is designed to last the entire school year. The template is also editable and provides practice for writing, brainstorming, proofreading, planning/outlining, and gives the students the opportunity to respond to controversial topics. Each worksheet provides a writing prompt, a space for the student’s response, a place for an additional picture if the student wishes to include one, and various other components depending on the type of prompt/style of response.

While I love the idea of free-write time, I think that students will likely need a little more structure, especially if they have never experienced this routine of writing in another class, to perform best during bell-work time. Maybe after the first semester of directed writing time using this resource or a similar one I could transition into free-write once the students are in the habit of coming in each day prepared to write a short response of some type. I think that this would actually work best because students would not only learn the routine, but they would gather ideas about appropriate topics to write about the various formats that they may use to communicate their ideas.

I’m not sure if writing for bell-work would necessarily be the one thing I fight the hardest for… but I definitely think this is an excellent way to get the creative juices flowing and to simply get students interested in writing so that they may perform better on other writing assignments in the class!

 

Chaos in Life -- Normality in The Classroom

Our personal lives do not always allow for peaceful repose upon walking into the classroom in the morning. My mentor teacher and I can both attest to this recently. However, in several ways, walking into that classroom does bring me a sense of normality and structure which helps me thrive and love what I do, allowing the outside world to fade away while fulfilling that glorious role of educator. 

"Time is nothing": a quote from one of my all time favorite novels, The Time Traveler's Wife. And while I agree with this statement in so many respects, time is everything in the classroom. I cling to this time; I marry it; I follow it religiously. Ten minutes for bell work -- thirty minutes for grammar -- thirty minutes for literary analysis -- remaining minutes devoted to finishing up individual work and assigning homework. Aah, so structured. So sure. 

Relationships -- so messy, aren't they? Well, not in the classroom. I am the teacher; you are the student. There is no gray line there. There is no question of roles or status or hierarchy. I want the best for my students and will do anything in my power to help them along their path to success, and my students respect me. Of course, the daily goings on and hashing out of this are not always so clean cut, but the understanding is always there, underlying everything we do and say. 

White paper. Black ink. Words which bring inanimate pages to life. Words which have meanings and correct spellings. Sentences which have correct structures. Paragraphs which have correct formats that funnel and flow and connect. These are the clay to my potters hands. These are my forte. These are unchanging. These I know. These I understand. These I can teach. 

Yes, my life, our lives, are messy, unstructured, riddled with difficult relationships, straining situations, ambiguous futures. However, as educators, when we step into that classroom, all of those things should fall away. These things should fade as we enter the classroom and put on the apron and begin molding young minds. We need not only to find our repose and peace and strength in the structure of our classrooms, but we should provide this stable environment for our students as well. We should foster it, grow it, allow its aroma to fill the room in such a way that when those students enter, there is no question what is expected of them and how the class period will play out.