ELA 20: Oct 8 Blogging or Typing Time…

Students were given this entire class to create their third blog entry for the course. Any time needed after that they could use to complete the other two blog entries (by adding a picture, link to an article of a related topic, and link to a comment on a peer’s blog) or finish their “Should’ve Been…” poems that are due tomorrow.
Again, they were reminded to focus on their use of computer time. Some were very efficient in how they used their time while others seemed to accomplish very little during this time.

ELA 20: Oct 7 Questions and Reading Out Loud…

I had a sub in for me today. Mrs. Kerpan led the students through today’s activities.
They finished reading the article from yesterday about what children learn through children’s stories. The students were given question sheets with the article yesterday so they were given time to work individually on answering them. They were to do it by themselves to help them become more comfortable filling in full answers. They then discussed the questions and shared their responses so they could add to their own answers.
Once finished that, Mrs. Kerpan read aloud an article to them that focused on the ten benefits in reading aloud to children. It’s one thing to have kids read on a regular basis, but there are several benefits to reading to them. For example, it often gives them an opportunity to experience a story that’s written in language possibly a bit advanced for their own reading skills so having it read to them exposes them to new stories. It also allows children a chance to observe someone else read or model for them how to experience the grammar in stories, with the reader pausing at the commas or observing the periods. Children benefit a great deal from being read to.

One of the assignments planned for this unit is for students to work in groups and create a readers theatre to perform for the elementary grades. The focus is to take a fairy tale and adapt it to make it more modern yet still have the same lesson. This takes quite a few classes to do, though, and to keep on track with our unit I’ve decided this year to skip this project. In its place, though, I had the students watch videos of two readers theatres students of mine two years ago created. They did a wonderful job of including the audience in the storyline and then Kenaston students benefited from understanding what their own project would have been like.
We started reading an article, then, titled “Who’s Afraid of the Wicked Witch” about children’s stories and how there are actually really awful lessons told in those stories that can have a bad influence on children’s expectations, like that magical fairies will save the day for you or people are either ugly and evil or pretty and nice. It was an interesting article that opened our eyes to some of the realities of what really is in those childhood stories.

To begin today’s class, we started in the computer lab where students were given exactly 20 minutes (plus an extra 5 for good measure) to log into their blogs, type two paragraphs pertaining to their desired relationship with their parents and any reflection of the literature we’ve just studied about the topic, and publish it. Last year, any time spent for blog entries seemed fairly unfocused and students worked at quite different levels of productivity. This year, I’ve explained that I’ll focus on giving more blog time, but they also have to use it more effectively. Twenty five minutes should have been adequate time for them to write something of value (for the content should still be well considered) but their focus should be more centered and less distracted. Hopefully, they’ll become more comfortable getting a whole post done in that time.
Then we returned to the classroom to enjoy reading some kids poetry. Some of them were just goofy and had cute ideas, but they mostly all had a rhyming pattern that added to their humour. We talked about the fact that it takes a lot to entertain these students at this age in their life, but at one time when they were quite young their imagination was more intact and it took very little to entertain them. We had fun with the poems; even screamed out one a few times. lol This began our look into children’s literature and how it’s so infused with wonder and imagination.

The Grade elevens went on a Field Trip to Saskatoon today so there was no English class.

There was no English class today because of a high school field trip to Saskatoon.

I returned to class today. Since before I left we were working on developing better responses to literature questions, it seemed fitting to test them on those skills. They wrote a mid-unit test on questions related to “The Piano” poem, including some figurative language to be found as well as 20 homonym questions. They did a great job and had a great attitude doing it.
I marked the exams by the end of the day and was pleased to share them with each.

I returned to class today. They needed a portion of today’s class to finish the movie. We used the rest of class to review where we’re at in the course and go over some specifics for their story assignment. Its due date will be postponed, since I haven’t supplied them with a rubric of assignment sheet yet. We’ve discussed the details of the assignment, but I haven’t given them the sheet yet.