So here's what's going on in my classroom lately:
In Language Arts News...
My 7th and 8th grade students have started studying the novel The Complete Perseopolis. If you've never read it, I highly recommend it! I was actually assigned this book in a college class about religion, but it is super interesting and fast-paced.
We are, however, taking a VERY long time to get through it. While it's fast for an adult to read through it for pleasure, it's much harder for a class to go through it and understand it. After every few pages, we have to stop and discuss what has happened to Marji or what is happening in her life. My students seem very interested in what is happening in this true-story account, but there is a lot of discussion that goes on for that understanding
So...I came up with an idea. A word wall! Ok, I didn't say it was an original idea. ;) But this one is more for the understanding of very domain-specific vocab. Many that I don't even know! I am always very transparent with my kids; when I don't know something we look it up! So my students are armed with their iPads every time we read, and they are in charge of looking up terms that we have yet to learn!
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| This is only from a few chapters...I'm gonna need a bigger board! |
As for me, when they are looking up the words, I'm writing them down on these (matching!) notecards and putting them up. SO many words I had no idea the meaning of. Every once in a while I feel a little weird telling my students I don't know, but I want them to know that even teachers don't know everything! Especially about the 1978 Iranian Revolution!
I am also using the Bookrags companion to Persepolis as a guide for questions. It's an awesome resource! My administration has recently asked teachers to be more rigorous with their writing assignments, so that means a lot more essay questions for these guys. In all honesty, this is NOT my favorite thing to be grading. But I have found a pretty good generic rubric for essay grading in a Close Reading workbook that my students use. But UGH, now I have to be the bad guy marking up their essays and giving them low grades. Meh.
If you have ever taught this book, let me know! I've been scouring TpT and Pinterest but I'm not finding a whole lot of fun activities. I know it's more of a high school read, but high schoolers have fun too right?
In the art room...
I'm still getting used to seeing my kiddos after Christmas break! I feel like we went REALLY hard with the seasonal projects during December (I do this by design...so many schedule upsets happen in December that it's easiest to do shorter projects that are mostly Christmas themed...Catholic school perk!). So now that it's January I REALLY wanted to do some meaningful art history-based lessons. Our artist of the month is Alexander Calder.
While he's most famous for his sculptural works, I was really drawn to his continuous line drawings and sculptures. I also was very inspired by Kaitlyn over at Art with Mrs. E. Her continuous line drawings she did with her kids turned out beautifully! Mine turned out...well they turned out.
I forgot how hard it was to do this WELL. It's super fun though, my fifth and sixth graders were a fit of giggles the entire class and actually working. That never happens! Here's a collection of comments overheard during this process:
"You look like the guy from 'Up!'"
"My eye is coming out of its socket!"
"That boy looks like a woman!"
"Hold still!"
"I forgot the ears/nose/one eye/nostril!"
I hope to eventually follow in Kaitlyn's footsteps and do a blind contour painting, but we'll see how that goes. But the class definitely had fun with it!
