ELA Awesomeness
The students are awesome! ~ Mrs Schick
December 2015
Your students have been busy!
This trimester the students:
- Reflected on who they are as readers, writers & learners. Then, they set obtainable goals
- Gotten to know each other and built up our classroom community
- Used a variety of online tools, including Kahoot!, Google Apps, infographic design tools, Poll Everywhere, and iMovie.
- Practiced reading and analyzing a range of short stories
- Established reading habits and stamina with our independent reading books
- Wrote a short story focusing on developing a strong plot, interesting characters, and thematic resolution
- Learned about satire, irony, theme, characterization, plot, inciting incidents, conflicts, point of view and how they affect a story
- Learned how to identify verbs -- not just action verbs, but linking & helping verbs
- Then, learned how to keep those verbs consistent in writing
- Started to work on our ePortfolio
And that's not all...
Building Community Through Growth Mindset
Students are encouraged to take ownership of their learning by recognizing there will be moments of difficulty. In our class, "This is too hard" really means, "What do I need to do to learn this?"
The Power of Students Helping Students
Students are encouraged to help each other during the learning process. Here, students created Kahoot practice quizzes for the final exam.
Using Technology to Learn
Students are encouraged to collaborate, communicate, and create using the classroom devices and their own devices.
Right now students are creating iMovie Trailers
Students are working collaboratively on creating an iMovie trailer for one peer's short story. We are talking about movie trailers as a genre and how a designer uses specific parts of the story to entice the audience; how music sets the tone (similar to words in a story), and the skills needed to work productively and collaboratively. It seems like they are really enjoying this project. Oh...by the way -- it's a competition. Potentially, their trailer will go up against trailers from Mrs. Mayers' classes and Mrs. Gates' classes. There is an "Oscar" on the line here.
Coming Up in Tri 2
The Big Stuff...
- Argumentative writing
- Analyzing literature (mentor text is the play: "The Diary of Anne Frank")
- Informational Text Reading
- More fun :)
Looking to donate...
We need books! The students really enjoy using my classroom library. It's awesome. However, several of my books go missing each year, and I am unable to replace them all. Therefore, I am in desperate need of books. If you would like to donate, our classroom would benefit from gift cards to Amazon or any store where I can buy books (Target, Meijer, Walmart, etc.). I also created an Amazon Wish List on the classroom website.