The conference was AMAZING!  We had just under 200 people. (Read below to learn why that is impressive.)  We have already discussed changes for next year’s conference.  We hope you will consider joining us.  Check RMWP.ORG for updates.

This conference schedule is a thing of great beauty.  You can now also download the conference program.

When I first started planning for this conference, I was told to expect around 30 people to show up.  As of today we have about 152 registered.  I am amazed at the support.  I have never done this before.  It has been eye-opening.If you are interested in hearing Kylene Beers and Bob Probst along with 12 other presenters speak, I would encourage you to come on down, over, or up to Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday (27 February 2010).Here is a link to the page where you can register: 21st Century Literacies Conference(I will remove the option to register at 11:59 p.m. the night before the conference.)

Visit English CompanionJim Burke, author of numerous Language Arts books, has created a network via ning.com. I would encourage you to join. In addition to offering an avenue for conversations with other professionals, this network gives you access to countless resources as well as big-name authors.

So come join in the fun at englishcompanion.ning.com today.

Okay…so, what does that mean for you? It means having students write their thoughts instead of speaking them, which is, as we all know, an important skill when one depends on the internet/email to communicate. Below I give a very basic explanation of how it works and how you can use Firefly in your classroom.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit a firefly-enabled website, you can click anywhere on the site and start typing. When you do, a bubble will pop up with whatever you are saying. Pretty interesting.

 

WAYS IT CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Have your students look at different documents. Set a timer and do virtual stations. Each time the timer sounds, students would go to a different virtual station (or page of your website) to discuss via firefly.
2. You could anonymously post various students’ work for critique. Then they can print screen when they are done.
3. Put pictures of various advertisements your website and have students evaluate it for bias and/or method of using propaganda.
4. Have students do something like a word cluster.

I like this site because it allows for quiet evaluation of materials while giving a the assignment an edgy feel.

I would love to hear from you regarding ideas for using firefly.

I recently signed up for a project called Word Count Journal. As I was writing my daily journal entry this morning, I started thinking about how great this would be in the classroom. Here’s how it works:

Sometimes a little bit really does go a long way. In Word Count Journal, by gradually building up your writing stamina and discipline, you will see just how easy it is to get a whole lot done. By simply writing a set number of words each day, every day, you will write a whopping 66,795 words at the end of one calendar year. Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.

It is hard to believe but 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 … + 364 + 365 = 66,795. Just like the Confucian saying that the longest trip begins with the first step, your journal journey begins with the first word.

So, imagine having your students log on everyday to do their daily journal. I think they would find the format less intimidating that a regular notebook journal, where a big blank page is staring up at them, waiting to be filled. A lot of pressure! I remember that well from school, and even now, in my own notebook journal. With Word Count Journal, it’s easy to feel a sense of accomplishment since the daily goals are so manageable and I’m willing to be that many students would end up writing a lot more than the alloted daily word count.

In terms of privacy, teachers could create private groups and instruct their students to keep their journals private, so that only classmates can read it, or maybe just the teacher. Teachers could choose whether to use the commenting feature and have students comment on each other’s journals. If any of you teachers have tried it, leave a comment with your thoughts or contribute a blog post about it!

In a previous post, Ben asked us to consider how we use figurative language techniques in the classrooms. As luck would have it, I am right in the midst of a unit around figurative language with my sixth graders. I often begin with hyperbole, as my students are naturally prone to some exaggeration in their stories anyway.

We begin by talking about American Tall Tales and the way they use hyperbole to entice the reader and excite the narrative. I remind them that many tall tales were first based on real people. I talk about this equation:

Hyperbole + Legend= Tall Tale

We then listen to the story of Davey Crocket and I conduct a listening quiz. They love this story of this bizarre man who was born when a comet hit the top of a mountain, wrestled with the biggest panther of the forest and tamed it, took on Mike Fink in an animal-sound duel on the Mississippi River, and then headed off to the Alamo (where, unfortunately, he met his end that began his journey into American folklore).

Using this concept, I have my students write short tall stories about some real life event that happened to them. I provide an example of a tall tale story in which my entire classroom of students turns into penguins one day. They get a chuckle out of that one and are eager to write.

This year, we blogged our tall tale stories at The Electronic Pencil and then I collected some of the better stories and used Google Page Creator (a free website tool from the Google Suite) to make a website of tall tales.

Here are a couple of student tall tales:

Read The Full Story…

Paragraph writing is still a mainstay in our elementary school and I try to move my students into the four main forms of paragraphs (descriptive, expository, persuasive and narrative) through activities that make the writing personal for my sixth grade students. Thus, with expository writing, they become experts on a topic and explain it to the class. For persuasive writing, we worked on editorials on the situation in Darfur, Sudan (see Many Voices for Darfur project).

And for narrative writing, I try to use something concrete to get at something abstract.

In this case, I have them consider a physical object that has some deep memories attached to it. This all begins with a picture book, however. I pull out my copy of Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Patridge by Mem Fox, in which a little boy helps an elderly friend retrieve her lost memories by giving her some tangible gifts. A puppet reminds her of her younger sister. A war medal brings back thoughts of a brother lost to war. A shell reminds her of vacations at the beach as a child.

Read The Full Story…

(FOR OTHER POSTS ABOUT JOURNALING, CLICK HERE.)

These are a few of the prompts I have used in my classroom. I have ranked them from least favorite to most favorite. Look for part 2 soon. I will do 20 each time I post them.

• A time when you were limited.

• Write about a favorite cartoon that no longer airs on t.v. (This is great because the students will condure up shows that they have not thought about in a while. They get excited about that.)

Read The Full Story…

I always try to be a reflective teacher and learn as much from my failures, as my successes. When the time came to start my third graders writing biographies, I thought back to the disaster that was last year’s assignments. I had previously taught biographies by having each student chose a famous person they idolized. It seemed like a reasonable idea. They would have ownership in choosing the subject of their assignment and they could sharpen their research skills in the same process. My frustration came when I started reading rough drafts. They were complete plagiarisms of the books and articles from which the students’ reports came! I take this sort of thing seriously and decided to have a stern talk with my 8-year-olds about “stealing words” from published works. However, my lecture seemed to fall on deaf ears, as they were a bit too young to understand the concept. We did, however, practice writing sentences in our own words.

Fast forwarding to this year, I was certainly not going to make the same mistake twice. After a few days of pondering, I decided upon a different strategy of research: the interview. The students were still going to write biographies about people they looked up to. They were still going to have (some) choice in who the subject of their paper would be. The difference this year would be solely in how they gathered information. I created a sign up sheet on a piece of chart paper, onto which I had written names of our school’s administrative and support teams. It included people like the principal, assistant principals, guidance counselor, music teacher, P.E. teachers, and Art teacher. Read The Full Story…

One way I have found that I can create a writing community is through journaling. I had been doing it on my own for years, but I really discovered the power of it while participating in the National Writing Project (our chapter is the Red Mountain Writing Project). Since that life-changing experience, I began implementing it in my classroom. Sometimes I will use it to front load for a unit. Other times I will use it to discuss controversial issues going on in our country or community. However, most of my prompts are designed to allow me to get my students to find common ground.

When I do my course evaluation at the end of the year, I consistently get comments from students saying that they had seen themselves as writers before they entered my class. But the funny thing is that all I do is give them topics. By writing and sharing, they build their own community; they are the ones shaping their own styles.

Here are 5 rules for building your own community:

Read The Full Story…

I have always been interested in finding ways to create an audience for my students as writers. When the audience moves from beyond the teacher’s eyes to something larger, the internal inducement of young writers changes. They become more aware of what they are creating and they start to see themselves as not just students, but as writers. This is a key shift in perspective.

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to give students some leadership opportunities and so I proposed leading a Student Council. The fifth and sixth graders on the Student Council organize school spirit events, raise money for worthy causes and help make decisions for our school. It is a wonderful experience and I feel blessed to be involved with these young leaders.

Last year, one student suggested the Student Council create a newspaper just for student writing, and we all pounced on that idea. The newspaper now features writing from students from across all the grade levels. This was not the first time I have used a newspaper format for writing but it is a much larger effort. Read The Full Story…

To read the other posts in this series on T. S. Eliot’s poem, click HERE.

Teaching “The Waste Land” presents a daunting task, yet one that provides a great opportunity to practice the oft-overused progressive maxim: Learn with your students. I, myself, do not fully understand the poem, so teaching it means that you will have to say, “I don’t know,” that you will have to believe that your students may have a better insight on an aspect of the poem than you, and that you will discover meaning in the poem together, often at the same time.

In a sense, you really do have to bury the dead: the assumptions of students about what poetry is; traditional modes of interpreting literature; your pride; maybe even the high level of writing to which you surely have already brought your students (even my best writers find it difficult to write well about something they do not understand well). But, like the end of the first section of the poem, what is buried has potential to rise again: the narrator asks about the corpse planted in the garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” which indicates that, despite massive amounts of despair, there is at least a small possibility of hope, an apt metaphor perhaps for the teaching of a poem such as this.

So the beginning of the week and a half we spend tearing this poem apart begins with a disclaimer for my students: You will not like this poem, and you will likely think that Eliot was smoking crack. Read The Full Story…

I found this great little lesson idea while surfing the Net looking for, well, um, great little lesson ideas.The Grade 8 teacher I’m working with is trying to get her students to write creatively. How do you do that? Well, this particular lesson idea suggested re-writing a fairy tale from the point of view of the antagonist. This little twist on the normal fairy tale got the kids thinking since, not surprisingly, not many of them have ever considered how a familiar story works from the bad guy’s point of view.

While the website where I borrowed this idea suggested fairy tales mainly, I suppose, to use the lesson with younger children, it was useful for my junior high kids because it meant I could steer them to a number of different stories that are in good taste and fairly well known.The students really did seem to like this lesson and came up with some really pretty good material that they shared with each other on a blog.Fair warning: Not all the Grade 8s seemed familiar with basic fairy tales, so I provided them with links to the stories. Generally I found these tales on Wikipedia.