Sunday, June 27, 2010

Week Three

On Monday, Jill McCaskill, a kindergarten teacher from Jackson, taught us that we all have a story to tell. In her classroom, she helps her students write by posting a word wall in her classroom. She encourages her students to write by asking them to list things they know. Her enthusiasm and ideas are an inspiration!

Melanie Sargent, a high school English teacher from Lauderdale County, presented a fun demonstration called “Tea, Anyone? A No Fear Initiation into Poetry Analysis.” She began by handing out invitations to a tea party, and inside each envelope was a card with a phrase on it. The phrase was from a poem, and everyone in the room had a different phrase. Melanie asked us to walk about and share our phrases; afterword, we got into groups and discussed what we thought about the poem. We then shared our predictions about the poem before Melanie gave us each a copy of the poem. It was very interesting to compare our beliefs about the poem and to compare those beliefs with the actual poem.

In Classroom Inquiry, David Carithers continues to help us focus our questions and subquestions. On July 1, we each have to turn in a one-page report of our classroom inquiry plans, including the question, subquestions, background information, steps we plan to take, and gathering tools.

On Tuesday, we enjoyed a presentation by Julie Langford about using tabloids to teach writing. Julie, a fifth grade teacher in Martin, presented “Tabloid Writing: The Power of Exaggeration.” We began by listing similarities and differences between newspapers and tabloids. She showed us a few humorous examples of tabloids, and then she handed out tabloid titles and asked us to write our own. We shared and had a lot of fun!




Tech Tuesday was filled with useful information, as always. The group traveled to the Crisp Hall computer lab, where Jenny led us in exploring commoncraft.com, delicious.com. tagxedo.com, freetechforteachers.com, online photo sharing, and glogster.







On Wednesday morning, Joanne Stagner taught us about graphic organizers and inspired us to make a change in the world. She teaches expository writing by sharing the Michael Jackson song “Man in the Mirror” with her students. Students listen to the lyrics and think of ways they can improve themselves or society. Dividing a page into four parts, we all worked to organize our thoughts as a pre-writing tool.

In Exercises in Revision Wednesday, David shared with us the difference between revision and editing. Revision is about looking at the order, clarity, flow, continuity, voice, style, topic, tone, and organization of a piece of writing. Editing means finding and correcting mistakes in grammar and spelling.



Thursday began with a demonstration by Cindy Taylor of Finley Elementary School. Cindy uses journaling in her classroom. Sometimes the prompts are content-area topics. She often gives them writing time with no topic, but the class brainstorms about topics before they begin. She has her student draw vertical lines in their journals to separate the days of the week, and one section is left open for her comments when grading the journals. She said several really powerful things during her demonstration. One quote from Cindy is, “We don’t write just for a test. We write because it’s a life skill and an extension of ourselves.”

Following Cindy’s demonstration, we participated in an activity that allowed us to explore many NWP books. A few of the titles we liked were Pam Houston’s Cowboys are my Weakness, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Thomas Newkirk’s Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, and Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle.

Also on Thursday, we divided into our content areas and discussed the books we’re reading. Following the book discussion, we all traveled to Brandy’s, where we enjoyed a nice meal and another exciting read-around. This was a great week!

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