getting along

Some days the people you have to be around get on your nerves or upset you. What to do? Given that the adult world hardly provides the best models at times, it can be hard for our teenagers to know what to do when these times come up.

Making things worse through insults or teasing is not an option. Nor, I tell the students, is the opposite behavior practical. As an example I told them the story of a school I worked in long ago, where there had been a week of many upsets among students. The principal called a whole school assembly, and expressed her disappointment that so many students were not getting along. In conclusion she asked the whole school, staff and students, to stand up. We all did, with some curiosity. "Right," she said, "everyone hold hands with the person either side of you."

My students cringed at the thought of having to do such a thing, as I had cringed. So I don't ask them to do that.

There is a middle ground, one that is civil, or neutral, and when we do have a conflict, that is where I tell them to go.

the last quarter

Time seems to accelerate in May...just a few weeks left for the school year. Still, we continue to work hard with all our reading, writing and math projects: as excited as the students are about an approaching long vacation, they are still working to a productive routine.
We are closing in on the end of our tie dye project, which has been great fun, and the work is beautiful. More news about this soon.

reading

We use a number of strategies to promote reading skills with our students, following The 15 Principles for Reading to Deaf Children in particular. Click on the link and take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with these principles.

Our group reading book is The Hundred Dresses , by Eleanor Estes. I prepare up to eight 'slides' for each reading class, using Powerpoint. Each slide has 'manageable' blocks of texts for students to read, analyze, and then switch to ASL. I project each block of text to the Smartboard, and this friendly method of presenting the text is helpful to our reluctant readers, who can feel daunted by a thick book, or even a long page of text. It's been nice to see students curious and even impatient at times to see what is in the next slide, and trying to find out by reading it.

In one slide this week, the phrase putting yourself in someone's shoes came up. It's something we teachers need to do when thinking about what it's like for our students to climb the mountain called English.

in the loop: writing what you see..

We have established a weekly routine for individual writing assignments, using a new technique for a writing prompt. This typically involves the films we use for Literature. I select very brief clips - around 20 seconds or so - and on the laptop I can set this clip on a repeating 'loop'. This is projected on the Smartboard and the students use their laptops to write what they see. The goal is for them to try and be as accurate as possible, which means including all the dialog they see, plus actions and expressions. The next step will be to add relevant information that is not always explicit in the clip: such as setting, background, emotions and thoughts. As I said to one student who was working with Chaplin's The Kid, if there is something touching in the movie clip, then I want to be touched in the same way by your writing. We have a good editing process in place, and I am seeing improvements in their first drafts.

cotton bolls

Last week we had ASL story time with Rita Gipson, and the theme was cotton. The tie-dye project is using cotton T-shirts, and so it was interesting to find out more about the fabric we are working with.
Leona and Emily, our great, creative librarians, organized a wonderful activity after the stories: examining bolls of cotton and removing the seeds. It's not easy! And as we are also looking at the role of cotton production in US history, it felt like we were getting our hands on the past too.

silent, but busy

Sorry it's been quiet on the blog lately. We have been very busy in the classroom and finding the time to publish new posts has been difficult. But the wheels are turning again...

I.O.C. tie dye shirts

The Middle School business, Island Ocean Crafts, is in the middle of its next great project. The students have been settled on making and selling tie dye shirts.
Several subjects are addressed through the project. We have been researching cotton and its importance in US history. We have also been working on managing budgets, and the math related to borrowing (and the concept of negative numbers). Our writers have come up with some slogans for the catalog, and there are some very persuasive ones!
Once the catalog is out, we will process orders and begin production. All just in time for the warm spring weather, whenever it comes.