This Week At School

This week at school was just like the previous 2... as my subbing gig was extended for another week.  By the end of the week it was decided that they would hire me on as a full time teacher until the end of the year.  So, huzzah I now know where I will be for the next 2 months!

I guess I could explain the position a bit...

It's about 2 grade 7 English classes per day which means I have a lot of non teaching time that gets filled in with me helping in other classrooms.

So, what have we been doing in ELA?

When I got there the class was working on this playground project.  Basically, they were designing a playground for kids while looking up some guidelines of current playground standards, watching videos and reading articles on other "controversial" playgrounds from around the world.

The assignment is to design it, write about it, make a commercial for it, and present this all to the class... on Tuesday.  Some groups will do fine with the Tuesday deadline other groups... well I'm not so sure how it will turn out.  But seriously, they've had 3 weeks!

While doing this we have also been learning about ethos, pathos, and logos and seeing what they are like in different forms of advertisements... they just wrote a test on this and thankfully most of them did okay on it.

We are also reading Underground to Canada

It's a lot going on so I'm hoping by wrapping up one thing (the playground stuff) we can focus more on some of the other stuff... which at this point would be Underground to Canada.  The problem is that one of the classes that I have is in the computer lab and so it would be nice if I had some kind of assignment or project they needed to do some research or type up (which when the playground stuff wraps up... I don't have... currently).

I'm mulling over a few ideas for future plans with these kiddos to get us through to the end of the year.

TUSC would be a great use of time in the computer lab and I already have a booklet for this.
Debates would work well because these kids love to talk (and I found a debate unit that uses ethos, pathos, and logos in it).
When I taught grade 5 and 6 I read my students The Westing Game because they wanted a mystery... I'm considering it again in grade 7 as a read aloud for maybe the last month because I think they would be into it (and one of the grade 6 classes is reading a mystery and most of the class is super into it so I'm just hopeful for the same results).
Their previous teacher was also using Showbie (which I'm just starting to learn about) and has a bunch of stuff in there ready for them to look at once I make it available to them... I just need to look through it first.