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Friday, November 14, 2014

Positive Words for Positive Feelings

In Speech, I often battle the fear of speaking. It usually comes down to student feeling judged or not good enough. To battle this feeling we do an activity early in the course, like day 2 or 3 when students are still getting to know each other.

I count them off in smaller groups, assign them an area on the white board and sit one person against the board. I instruct the groups to write as many nice things about the person around their head. I snap a picture when the group is finished and we quickly erase. I then make a video of all the images to be watched the day of the first speech. What a relief to see kind and positive things written by classmates.


This has made all the difference in our classroom culture and over all first speech jitters. This is by far one of my favorite activities (Demonstration Speeches with food are a close second.) I also want to highlight 2 very interesting speeches from the first round of "Speech of Introductions." Students seem to find the coolest ways to explain what defines them!

Video Games 
Sleeping and Eating

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Fast Presentations

The English 11 class did such a wonderful job with creating and presenting their ThingLinks that I took a video. Aren't they fast workers/presenters? See this post for more information about the assignment and some up close examples.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

ThingLink & Emily Dickinson

English 11 - 3 just started, and finished (Yes, they are that impressive.) a section in Unit 3 about Emily Dickinson. Instead of the same old, read and respond, we broke it up and threw some technology in for presentation and the outcome, my friends, was simply beautiful.

We used ThingLink which is a website (and an application for the iPad) type of presentation supplement. Here is how I presented the assignment and I honestly let them run with it and there are examples below. Hover over the picture and you can see bullets with more information about the assigned poem.






Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Blackout Poetry

Today in my English 11-3 we started a poetry unit. Sometimes students are overwhelmed with the idea of writing their own poems. Heck, sometimes I am overwhelmed when trying to craft my words into a poem, or blog post.

Sooooooo, I did some searching and came across Austin Kleon. He is a writer/artist who lives in Austin, Texas. He started a movement called Blackout Poetry. You use already generated text, and mark out the words that mean nothing to you, but leave visible the words that move you.

What was created in "my four walls of learning" moved me and I am beyond excited to present some of these tomorrow to the students, don't worry I posted several examples below, and to continue through our study of poetry. We are starting a group project with Emily Dickinson using ThingLink! Stay tuned for the assignment and outcomes.











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