Pocketmod.com is a great website for giving your student the opportunity to create a compact study guide. As I’ve demonstrated before, the act of creating a study guide as students progress through a course will likely help the information stick because of the tactile experience with the material and the task of deciphering between the essential content needed on the study tool.

I like poketmod because it is versatile. There are 45 different types of pages you can add to it. There is everything from lined paper to games.

How to make one:
1. Go to http://pocketmod.com
2. You simply click START near the top-right corner of the front page.
3. Then click the desired “pages” and drag and drop them on the 8 squares to the right.
4. Then when you print it you will have the pocketmod on an typical piece of copy paper.
5. Then you can watch the tutorial about how to fold it or read the direction sheet provided at the bottom of the first page.

I have decided to start a contest that could win you a $25 Visa gift-card. (I know it is not much, but I am a teacher paying out of his own pocket.)In one month (on March 24), I am going to send this out to the winner, which will be voted on by you, the reader.

Official Contest Rules:

• To enter, send three to six photos of your classroom to benjamindavis2000 at yahoo.com with Coolest Classroom Contest in the subject line.
• Include a description of your setup, including as many interesting details as possible about what makes your classroom so cool.
• Your photos should be at least 600 pixels wide. By sending them in, you’re giving us permission to publish them on TeachEng.us.
• Not every submission will be featured. We’ll do our best to dig through the submissions and feature the best and brightest.
• Your submission will be more likely to be featured if you tell us about your setup and take pictures that really show off your classroom.
• Also, tell us as much as possible about how you use your setup to enhance your curriculum and, if you have them, about workstations.
• All of the featured submissions will be voted on using our unscientific polling application.
• To verify that your classroom really belongs to you, pull up TeachEng.US on your computer and make sure it’s visible in at least one of your pictures. If we don’t feel that your submission is authentic, we won’t be able to feature it.
• And if you are wondering, I did pull this idea and the rules from Lifehacker.com’s cubicle contest.

Get to writing and snapping pictures! We will look forward to checking them out!

Ben

Ben shared some great prompts for journal writing for his students, and I thought it might be a nice balance to show some of the writing prompts that I use at the elementary school level. We do mostly-daily writing in notebooks, where my students’ only task is to be creative, keep writing and focus on content, not style or grammar (We work on those concepts in larger projects).

Like other teachers, I have borrowed, stolen and adapted from many different sources and brainstormed my own original ideas. I’m not always quite certain anymore which were mine and which were someone else’s. So, if you think you recognize any of these prompts, you probably do.

Here are some of the activities:

• Change the World — If you were given a chance to make one positive change in the world, what would it be? (You can listen to some of my students answer the question in a podcast from earlier this year)
• Design a Car of the Future — Use illustrations and expository writing to design a car on the market in the future. Make sure you use writing and symbols to identify elements of the car.
• Short Story Titles — Everyone brainstorms a list of five inventive short story titles and then everyone “donates” one title to the class list, which we pull out from time to time.
• Falling Leaf — Using first person narrative point of view, write from the viewpoint of a leaf falling from a tree in Autumn, and share the leaf’s experience. Create a sense of “voice” for the leaf. (And watch out for the lawn blower).
• Spiral Story — Breaking out of the habit of writing left to right, start a story at the center or the edge of the notebook page, and then write a story in which the sentences spiral either in or out on the page. The story should have some kind of round object in it.
• Invent a Sport — Invent some kind of new sport and, using expository writing, explain the rules on how to play and what kind of equipment is necessary to play your game.

And of course, we do plenty of freewriting, allowing them to make the choices on what they will write about and in what genre. As long as they are writing, I don’t bother them, and we almost never share our freewrites. That lets them get personal, if they want.

Here is a poem that I wrote the other day in class as my students were immersed in freewriting. I shared this over at my blog as part of a Slice of Life project.

Entering into Freewrite
Listen to the poem as podcast
I’m listening to pens – the words have no sound –
It’s all thoughts on the page.
These quiet moments are delicate pockets of complete freedom,
encouraging composition of poems, stories, plays, songs
and even comics –
They write with heads bowed and eyes focused;
Some move lips to mouth the words;
A silent incantation springing forth from mind to paper and back again.
I move among them as a ghost – a spiritual companion –
writing my own poem about them, writing,
in a sort of tacit recognition that what they do here has meaning,
even if the only eyes ever to read their words are their own,
and only their own.
We move on this journey, together,
as writers.

What prompts work best for you? Please share so I can steal your ideas (in a friendly sort of way)

– Kevin

(FOR OTHER POSTS ABOUT JOURNALING, CLICK HERE.)

(Check out the link at the bottom of this article.)

Recently a colleague of mine, Hope, told me of a writing assignment she has tried with her math classes. In an effort to create a reason for ALL content areas to make use of this site, I thought I’d write about how it could be used at all levels in both English and Math.

The assignment requires students to create a poem that lines up with the number for pi. Since the number does not terminate, you have to pick a cut off point, but at least the students can try to see who can create the poem with the most words. The students write a word that has the same number of letters as the digit they are on (3=3 letters, 1=1 letter, 4=4 letters, etc.). See the bottom of this article for more of the numbers.

USES IN THE ENGLISH CLASS:

This could be useful in the English class because you could examine the nature of the words used in the poem and/or our language. By asking the following questions, we can see how the sum of the letters is important:

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…

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

Chess is a game of strategy with many options at any point. Reading The Waste Land with students likewise can follow many paths. Following a linear route is not the only, or even best, method of examining the poem as it tends to be with other, non-modernist poems.

We begin with the ending, 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…

Over at the blog, Two Writing Teachers, there is a project underway for bloggers to post slices of their lives. They call it a challenge, but really, it is just another way to get people writing and thinking and sharing through the connected world.

How does it work?

You write about a slice of your life on your blog, and then link it back to Two Writing Teachers. From there, you can also follow links to the other folks involved in the project and connect with a wider circle of colleagues. 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…

I spent a class last week working with some English students. I tried to get them playing with palindromes, to little avail. Some how most Grade 8 students don’t seem to find palindromes interesting, or at least they don’t like the way I present them.

These unique words or phrases, such as radar or racecar, can be read forwards or backwards and they spell the same thing. I think they’re fascinating, but most of the kids tuned out and started playing other language games. While it was encouraging that they still played grammar games and wrote stories, I was a bit discouraged that no one was playing with palindromes.

Well, no one seemed to be until I saw two girls watching a YouTube video of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Bob.” I almost told those two to stop wasting time until I realized what they were watching. Weird Al would make an intriguing English teacher.

(Cross posted from Befuddled.)

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…