Meeting My Goal With a Dangerous Writing Prompt

The reasons I have this blog are to allow me a place to reflect and to help keep me more accountable for what I want to do.

By having a blog, I force myself to think about what I'm doing (mostly in my classroom). It gives me the opportunity - in a more formal way - to think about what's going well, what's not going so well, and what I'd like to try.

I also feel the blog makes me more accountable for my own goals.  If I set out a goal in a blog post, then I am declaring it to the world. Sharing the goal makes it more real and makes it more pressing to achieve that goal.  Sure, few, if any, people may read the blog posts, but the internet is live, public and forever.  This puts my goals out for everyone to see. Instead of keeping them private and being accountable to only myself, I have the sense that others could be looking over my shoulder, checking in on me.

So, as a result of this reflection, I’m recommitting myself to this blog.  This time, I’m giving myself a specific schedule. Expect a new post every Tuesday (there’s that goal made public). Today is Tuesday; so far, so good.

I also know that I can often have writer’s block, not knowing what to reflect upon or share. Consequently, I’m giving myself permission to be brief - a few paragraphs will be okay.  Also, to help break any blocks, I will use The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts. Game-like, the site has the writer keep working for a certain amount of time. If no progress is made after a certain interval, the program starts warning the writer, then the screen turns red, and you can no longer type (It does allow you to save work even if not finished.).

Not knowing what I would write for this post, I used The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts, set to three minutes. (I found it was a low expectation.)  I produced a few paragraphs in that time, then moved over to a word processor to finish up. I envision using the site with my students for activities like warm-ups or brain dumps in order to build their writing stamina and writing readiness. I am hopeful that they can see it as a tool that encourages improvement. 

I am optimistic that the schedule and the site will make my blogging goal manageable and attainable.

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If you have strategies to be a consistent blogger or to help develop students’ writing stamina, or, if this post has generated some thoughts of your own, please share in the comments. I would appreciate hearing from you.

Getting Students Engaged with Literature via Commericials

Wanting to help out my team's ELA with the students practicing some literary analysis, I turned to Jon Corippo's Lit Circles: Rebooted for the 4 C's and Common Core. (See his slide share here.)

Corippo's approach focuses on short, engaging bursts of student activities and repetition.  He encourages giving a time limit to students to make it like a game show and get their positive adrenaline pumping. Collaboration is also encouraged. With his lit circles approach he starts small and works toward student choice of reading material.

So, taking his lead, I started small like he suggests - with commercials. He uses those for the short bursts, to engage students, and to get in many repetitions so students can get more and more comfortable with their literacy skills.

His lit circles structure looks at four components: summarizing, conflict, characterization, and wishes (Wishes requires students to analyze and predict and to justify their responses, providing the ever-important "why".). You could change the components to stress skills you want your students to hone.

Different types of conflict for students to consider are presented in the 
Google Drawing. (SmartBoard tells students which block to work on
 based on where they sit in the group.)

I provided students with an overview and directions for each component.  I decided each student would work on each component - you could structure that in different ways and organize small group conversations, but I wanted the group to see each others' work to expose them to others' ideas and have conversations as they did the work.  So, I made a Google Drawing for each component.  Students made copies, shared, and began their work. 

But not until they started laughing while watching the commercial, of course.

I chose to use the Hyundai Kids Football commercial that aired during a Super Bowl. (You can see it here.)

Students were easily and quickly engaged.  

As we talked about their work, they needed some tweaks here and there, but, hey, that's what practice is for. Overall, the task was accessible to a wide range of students, and the commercial made it seem far less like work.

I have since had them practice with the original Geico caveman commercial and the Doritos dog commercial from the 2016 Super Bowl.  Both successfully engaged the students and had them practicing their literary analysis skills. It was also so easy to extend their thinking during discussion about concepts such as inciting incident and climax.

As the students got familiar with the format, they were able to complete the components more quickly, more accurately, and more insightfully.  Practice allowed them to push their thinking more.

This approach is definitely one I will share with the ELA teachers in the building. It is engaging and flexible and allows students to practice essential skills - while having some fun, too!

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If you have had success engaging students in literary analysis, or if this post has generated some thoughts of your own, please share in the comments. I would appreciate hearing from you.

Engage Your Students in Writing

Do you want your students to write effortlessly?

Jon Corippo shared 8 pARTS grammar at BLC15 last summer, and I was intrigued.

The basic idea is to get students to produce rich writing by having them practice often with highly stimulating images as the prompt.

Let me tell you...my students were tremendously engaged. They not only took to writing like they were writers, but they also were having fun - almost like they wanted to write.

I started with a picture of kids being mischievous that Corippo had shared (see it here). The students saw it projected on the board as they came in, and it immediately conjured conversation. I then had them recall the eight basic parts of speech and used the poem (linked here) to refresh any rusty recollections.

Then, the fun began.

Prompted by the image, students shared their ideas as I filled in this template:

• caveman sentence (grunts included)
• three verbs - and associated adverbs
• three nouns - and associated adjectives
• pronouns
• conjunctions
• prepositions
• interjections

Some struggled to participate accurately. But, hey, that’s what we were doing this for. They got the clarification they needed - especially about adverbs.

After we completed the template together, they wrote. And they wrote, and they wrote. Not one student struggled to begin or follow through. I was amazed at how they took to the writing.

And the results were spectacular. The writing was much more descriptive and rich than I was used to from my students. (There were some punctuation errors….but one step at a time.) They were using the parts of speech correctly, and their writing was more dynamic.  One example follows:

Charles and his acquaintance Bobby crudely redecorate his living room with the thick, white paint. Bobby was at Charles’ house and they were bored, so they decided to have a little fun. All of a sudden Charles’ mom burst into the room and shouted, “Golly!”

Charles looked up from the paint he was now spreading on the small television as terror crossed his face. He was in big trouble. Charles’ mom looked at the room in shock and thought to herself about how the children were being annoying and messy like the presidential candidates she was listening to on the radio just before. She quickly took out her phone and snapped a picture to put on Instagram where she now had a whopping 23 followers! She then walked over to the boys to begin scolding them when she slipped on the still wet paint and face-planted onto the floor. The boys took this as a cue to run out of sight of the angry woman.

The key, clearly, is finding highly engaging media to stimulate their writing.  In addition, the expectation for writing is only a paragraph, so students are getting a quick burst of practice.  By doing it often enough, I can see that students will become better writers.

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If you have used @jcorippo ‘s  8 pARTS grammar to enhance students learning or, if this post has generated some thoughts of your own, please share in the comments. I would appreciate hearing about them.

Meeting the Needs of ELL and Non-ELL Students

Meeting the needs of students whose primary language is not English can be challenging.  To encourage the students’ mastery of English, as well as content, classroom teachers should address the language domains of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  By giving students opportunities to use language in these ways, English language learners (ELLs) will become more competent in English while developing content knowledge.

During a sheltered English instruction course, I was exposed to a variety of strategies.  Some of the strategies jumped out as me as having a big bang for the buck for both ELL students and others.

Partner Reading

I was first exposed to partner reading through Larry Ferlazzo (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/).  Simply, students read aloud in pairs.  They alternate reading paragraphs and can do a variety of things to process the information after each paragraph, all involving discussion:  one sentence summary, circle key terms, draw the main point, question the paragraph makes you think about, etc.

This process slows the students down and makes them think more deeply about what they are reading.  All the students have multiple opportunities to manipulate the information.  I continually go back to this strategy, as it benefits each student.  In addition, if the reading were assigned for home, a percentage of students, especially those who struggle with reading, would not engage.  This strategy makes a difficult task far more engaging and productive.

Vocabulary/Idea Carousel

This strategy proved great as both a review and a prewriting activity.  Students are put into groups of four to five with one sheet of paper.  They are given a focus and need to write one thing associated with it before passing it to the next person in the group who would then add another item.  The paper keeps going around the group for a minute.  When a minute is up, each group shares their list to the class.  They are given a few minutes to review their materials: reading, notes, handouts, etc.  They then follow the procedure for another minute but cannot repeat anything their group wrote in the first round.

The students are exposed to a variety of ideas while reviewing or  prior to writing.  Instead of having students brainstorm individually, this collective means of brainstorming, complete with the sharing aloud, exposes students to far more ideas.  Students often stumble out of the gate trying to come up with ideas about which to write.  Instead, this strategy allows the student to start strong with a ready made list of key ideas and vocabulary which they can use to focus their writing. It also broadens their understanding as they review information.

Write Around

Students sometimes balk at writing.  The write around gets them to write in a more social setting and allows them to review ideas as they write.  The students each start with a piece of paper and a prompt or sentence starter.  They each write a sentence on the paper they have and, when done, pass it to the person to their right.  They then read what is written on the paper and add another sentence to the new paper.  They keep reading, writing a new sentence, and passing the paper to the right until the teacher asks them to stop.

Content is continually reread and the task of writing does not seem as daunting (compare it to asking the students to write a summary on a topic by themselves).  By blending the writing talents of several writers, there is exposure to a variety of understanding.  Write around has been a both a great review and writing activity.

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These three strategies are highly engaging for all students.  They also engage the ELL student in reading, writing, listening, and speaking while offering enriching opportunities to gain mastery of content.
  If you have any positive experiences with these strategies or others, please leave a comment. I would love to hear about them.