Page Turners: End of the School Year Projects

Greetings and welcome to Page Turners, a weekly Wednesday linky, where I feature great blog posts I have read (and sometimes that I have written). Hopefully you will find ideas that inspire you in your classroom and your teaching and maybe even a new blog to follow. Read down to the end of the post for directions if you are interested in linking up a post of your own.

And now on to this week's topic: end of the school year projects and activities. As you wind down the year, maybe you are looking for one or a few great last activities to do with students. Look no further than the posts below.

Guest blogger Jill Christensen shared this end of the year project with Getting Nerdy with Mel and Gerdy. Students create a scrapbook after reading a biography on a person of choice. This project involves all of the disciplines with different subject area teachers supervising different pages of the book.

Caitlin Tucker shares this project idea, creating a soundtrack for Romeo & Juliet, on her blog. Students pair songs with scenes from the play providing lines from the play and lyrics to support their choices. She provides a free download of the project handout plus some extra credit ideas. I am trying something similar with my students as we finish up Monster by Walter Dean Myers.

Julie Faulkner of Faulkner's Fast Five shares ideas about hosting a literary themed party, specially a Gatsby party. After doing a close reading of the party scene in the text, students make decisions on how to adapt that party to the classroom. Julie lists a few other texts/possible party scenes as well. Work hard, play hard right?

AP Lit Help offers three ideas on what to do after the test is over, whether it is the AP test, the class final, or any other kind of culminating exam. My favorite idea is the “Toast, Roast, Gift & Grub” Banquet. Students choose a favorite character/author to toast, a least favorite charter/author to roast, a character/author to give a gift to, and food to share with a connection to a text from the year. This would be a great way to review all of the texts read in a fun, yet meaningful way.

Another idea from Caitlin Tucker's blog, having students write a letter to their future self. While that is not a new idea, she shares a website that allows students to write and send a future email to themselves. Woah technology.

And just posted yesterday, check out this blog post and freebie for creating a literary theme park. Students will love designing an amusement park based on a recent or favorite text from the year. It's also a great way to tie in review of literary elements.

Be sure to check out the posts linked up below. Page Turners will be going on summer vacation, but will return in August. Leave suggestions for topics for next school year in the comments.

An InLinkz Link-up

Page Turners: Using Games to Promote Learning {5/13}

Greetings and welcome to Page Turners, a weekly Wednesday linky, where I feature great blog posts I have read (and sometimes that I have written). Hopefully you will find ideas that inspire you in your classroom and your teaching and maybe even a new blog to follow. Read down to the end of the post for directions if you are interested in linking up a post of your own.

And now on to this week's topic: using games to promote learning. As teachers, we are always looking for ways to make learning fun for our students. Using games, whether it is to review terms or simulate a concept, is a great way to keep students engaged.

The Curly Classroom offers this twist on Bingo to review author's purpose. Using a PowerPoint of text excerpts and a Bingo board of verbs (both which can be downloaded for free from the post), students decide which verb best fits each text. On their bingo board they must add the title of each text to the verb and to use the verb to explain the author's purpose. I'll be using this on Thursday as part of a review for our upcoming state exams.

Next up, Michelle Luck of A Lesson Plan for Teachers shares her human board game. Think Alice in Through the Looking Glass. The tiles of your classroom floor become the game board. Add arrows to show the direction of movement and spaces like "roll again" and "move back two spaces" to mix it up. Have students roll a dice and if they answer the review question, they can advance. Monday is our last day of review. Maybe I can pull this together by then?!

Mind/Shift offers three games about viruses that teach interconnectedness: one board game, one app, and one that is both! How does this relate to your content? Science or health teachers this is a perfect connection to teaching about germs and health precautions. Math teachers you can definitely work some numbers into these games. Social studies teachers, are you covering the Bubonic Plague, AIDS, Ebola? ELA teachers are you reading Poe's Masque of the Red Death or Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793?  The post offers ideas on assessing learning and connecting to real world events.

Mind/Shift offers three more educational games. Think Oregon Trail. The first, Elegy for a Dead World is a writing video game?! Students trek through worlds inspired by the Romantic poets Byron, Keats, and Shelley. They offer a free press copy to all you bloggers out there. They sent me one that I just haven't gotten around to trying yet. The second, Never Alone, introduces students to Native American culture, specifically the Inupiat people (native Alaskans). The third, Valiant Hearts, focuses on WWI. These games make me wonder what else is out there.

And the last post is a short one on using Pictionary and other games to review vocabulary. Seriously simple, but students love it. Could be used to review vocabulary or terms for any subject area at any level.

Be sure to check out the posts linked up below and come back next week for some great posts about end of the year projects & activities.

An InLinkz Link-up

Page Turners: Classroom Management

Greetings and welcome to Page Turners, a weekly Wednesday linky, where I feature great blog posts I have read (and sometimes that I have written). Hopefully you will find ideas that inspire you in your classroom and your teaching and maybe even a new blog to follow. Read down to the end of the post for directions if you are interested in linking up a post of your own.

And now on to this week's topic: classroom management. We all have that one student or maybe even that one class or many too many students in too many classes that are disruptive. Hopefully you fill mind some new ideas here for how to tame your little monster(s). 

Building community in the classroom is key to having a positive classroom environment and will eliminate many classroom management issues (ideally). Susan Barber of AP Lit Help blogs about five ways she builds community in her classroom. These ideas would apply in any classroom (not just an AP one) and any grade level. My favorite idea is "Funny Fridays." I have always wanted to start "Wacky Wednesdays."

We all have that tough student. The one that causes us to breathe a secret sigh of relief when he/she is absent because we just know our day is going to be a little easier. Dr. Allen Mendler, a blogger on Edutopia, offers four fresh starts for hard-to-like students. All four are easy to implement. 

Angela Watson of The Cornerstone explains the 2 x 10 strategy, a research based classroom management strategy. A teacher spends two minutes for ten days in a row talking to a difficult student about whatever the student wants to talk about. After ten days, a relationship will be formed making the difficult student less difficult. The blog post and comments have some great testimonials to the strategy's success.

Brain Waves Instruction blogs about "What I Know for Sure about Learning" and shares 10 ways to show students you care. This infographic is a quick visual introduction to her ideas, but read the post for all the details. Again, if you build positive relationships with your students that will eliminate many of your classroom management problems. Be proactive!

Think you can't do a marble jar with your middle school or high school students? Think again. This post is a cheap and easy DYI for creating a way to reward students and build classroom community.

Also be sure to check out the posts linked up below and come back next week for some great posts about using games to promote learning.

An InLinkz Link-up

Page Turners: Teaching Literature & Fiction Skills

Greetings and welcome to Page Turners, a weekly Wednesday linky, where I will feature great blog posts I have read (and sometimes that I have written). Hopefully you will find ideas that inspire you in your classroom and your teaching and maybe even a new blog to follow. Read down to the end of the post for directions if you are interested in linking up a post of your own.

And now on to this week's topic: teaching literature & fiction skills. If you are anything like me, you are always reinventing your lessons. Why use what you used last year when you know you can come up with something even better? You are always looking for new ways to teach old skills, new ways to teach new skills, or new ways to apply a skill to a piece of literature. These posts should definitely give you some new ideas about fiction skills and literature.

Lauralee of The Language Arts Classroom shares The Hungry Games, a parody of The Hunger Games, which could be used to teach parody or just for fun if you are reading The Hunger Games. It would also be a great "mentor text" for students to create their own parody of any text read in class.

Kristen of Secondary Solutions shares a lesson on symbolism and The Great Gatsby (but really could be used with any novel heavy on color symbolism). Assign a group of students a chapter and have them list any colors and connections to that color in the chapter. Then have groups record their findings on chart paper by color so that each group is adding to each color's chart. Once all groups have shared, see if students can determine the symbolic meaning of that color in the novel.

Perspective and point of view are two words we use interchangeably outside of the ELA classroom, so it is no wonder students confuse them or have difficulty distinguishing the two when we discuss them in connection with literature. Mandy of Caffeine and Lesson Plans posts about a lesson she did to help students differentiate the two ideas.

Check out Sara of Secondary Sara's seven ideas for teaching allusion, an integral part of Common Core literature standard #9 and a toughie to incorporate. My favorite idea is #7 where you ask students if an author "plagiarized" another author's ideas.

Somewhat similar to Mandy's lesson on perspective and point of view is my lesson on Point of View Retellings. I love to use children's books, specifically fractured fairy tales, to teach my high school students about unreliable narrator. Exploring how a story could be told from another character's perspective is also a great way to work on characterization. 

Be sure to check out the posts linked up below and come back next week for some great posts about classroom management.

An InLinkz Link-up