I am still quite convinced that it is Monday, not Thursday. That's not to say that I won't be overjoyed when tomorrow is Friday and the start of a three-day weekend.
Today was a very busy day--bulletin board madness, paper grading, copying, all kinds of fun stuff. Tomorrow won't be much better.
We did leads today. With the help of Ms. F's lead lesson (three of us exchanged lessons during this unit--it has been so awesome), plus my own resources from last year, I had a great linked double lesson. That's a rarity, despite all the bigwig talk about connecting reading to writing. Honestly, with the restraints, time limits, etc, it's bullshit.
But today it worked. We talked about leads and how they help us decide to read something or not. I gave each table a book at random, and they evaluated the lead.
Then I gave them things NOT to do in writing a lead, followed by three techniques for writing effective leads (action, snapshot, and dialogue). They practiced 'translating' boring leads into effective ones.
See? Blah.
1 comment:
Was one of the things that you taught them not to start out with "Hi. My name is John and I'm going to be writing about Dinosaurs. Ms. Johnson, I hope that you find my writing really interesting." I kiyou not, this is how most of the papers on our school bulletin boards start out. From first all the way to eighth grade! Some students even tell you in the first paragraph what the title of their paper is.
While I'm on this rant, I saw an eight grade bulletin board yesterday in which EVERY single paper had the exact same sentence starter for every paragraph!
Down with the Four Square!
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