ADVENTUROUS TEACHING STARTS HERE.
Get your classroom summer ready in just 5 days!
Crap.
School has been chuging along on what seems like an endless, antique, coal-powered train, and now as I look into the week ahead (amazingly organized and planned, somehow), I realize that there IS something I forgot.
Packing up my room.
So, here it is folks: the five day get your classroom summer ready plan. I have five weekdays ahead of me and my goal is to get my room totally cleaned and packed (minus what's absolutley needed for finals) in just five days.
The Next Poetry Challenge: The SESTINA
Have you ever asked your students to write a SESTINA?
If you haven't, you definitely should. Asking my kids to write this incredibly old-school, complicated form is always an excellent exercise in careful diction choice and inventive ways of demonstrating their understanding of connotation.
Teaching Shakespeare: Cooperative Learning
Everyone struggles to teach Shakespeare - no matter how strong your readers are.
This year, my goal was to bring the fun back into teaching Julius Caesar. The past few years, we've been really focused on writing rigorous, challenging rhetoric lessons for the play, and had kind of lost sight of the play itself.
In order to frame the play, I've developed a quick, free lesson for you that organizes the students into collaborative groups...
#TeacherTruth - An Interview with Hannah Leib
Welcome to our weekly series of #TeacherTruth Thursdays! Every Thursday, check back here for the latest interview with teachers from across the globe. This Thursday, I was able to interview Hannah Leib, first grade teacher at Geff Grade School in rural, southern Illinois. Hannah is a first year teacher (oh man, do I remember the struggle!) and she is known as Miss Leib to her kiddos, but as she says, "there’s always a day when I get 'Mom', 'Leiv, or 'Miss Leaf'".
5 Reasons I Love Teaching
But today I wanted to jump on the blog to share the love I have for teaching. Honestly, this time of year can get really tiring and downright depressing, so I'm challenging myself to reflect on why I love this job (even though seriously, it's so cold every morning I wake up, all I want to do is STAY UNDER THE COVERS FOREVER).
"Being Human" : A Lesson for Writer's Workshop
In between the first bout and the final found, Mrs. Deleon and I had the pleasure of sitting in on a writing workshop with one of our favorite Chicago poets, Adam Gottlieb. Adam is a former LTAB competitor and, quite possibly, Deleon's long lost hippie-child :-). He brought us a gorgeous poem from the duo Climbing Poetree called "Being Human". My brain is spinning with ideas for using this poem in class, but below is how Adam shared it with us.
