Over the years as a teacher I have become a tidier, more organized person. I never used to be that way, but my grade sevens now clean their desk, put their chairs away, before they are dismissed. I want respect for our classroom, for our space, and we try to do that. That being said sometimes I LOVE when my classroom is left messy because learning was occurring. Today we had stations of inventions and innovations from Mesopotamia. Students made clay tablets, stylus's, and wrote in cuneiform. They made ships with sails, and they even created rulers to measure cubits, digits, and feet (their literal, actual feet!). They didn't want to stop, and they got to experience what life was like, before we had pen, paper, ferries, jetboats, and even plastic rulers! When that kind of day happens, I am all right that our little old classroom isn't pristine. It reminds me that we are actually doing things; we are experiencing the world. I hope you make a mess sometime soon!
Interesting and clear: that's what good writing should be. I hope that by the time, my students leave grade seven, they will have this burned in their heads (only figuratively, I am certain my principal will not allow branding(or the legal system)). These are the ideas that I want students to be thinking when they come to a keyboard, pick up a pen, or even text. What are you writing; what are you communicating, and what is the best way to have that message received?
Today I had students review each others work, for these core components, and it worked just shy above mediocre. I know this is going to be a long process, and I am still looking for better ways for students to become editors. They are pretty good writers, but they can do so much more, and that is mainly from revising. We will see. Anyone have any hints? Today we worked further on the act of inferring. Students engage in the act of building a story and asking questions with incomplete information. We do this but looking at images and discerning from what we see what is happening. It is great to see all the different kids interpret information. Today kids were pretty exhausted from the week of mini courses but it was still quite worthwhile. We will later be working on having the balance in our writing of giving details but also avoiding revealing the whole story all at once.
The clustering of hundreds of monumental inscriptions mounted on huge poles along both sides of a highway was quite common. Each inscription represented a different religious sect or point of view and was placed as near as possible to heaven the traditional home of the North American gods. The level of spiritual rivalry becomes dramatically clear when we realize that shortly before the catastrophe some of the inscriptions reached heights of close to one hundred feed above the highway. Von Hooligan claims, and convincingly so, that these tremendous heights prove that the stripes were in fact designed to be used by airborne vehicles. I love getting students to read and interpret what has been interpreted by archaeologists from the year 4022. I use this lesson to introduce a few concepts: archaeology as a discipline of incomplete information, for one, and how to write and give your reader the chance to infer. Students will begin writing a similar description of an item from their room. They will add detail but also strike that balance of omitting detail to cause wonder and mystery in the reader's mind.
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November 2017
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