The Giver: Chapter 2

Two day weeks are so hard to plan for, but I got this! I'm a supah stah!

After taking baby steps through chapter one of The Giver, I set my kids up for independent work with chapter 2. We began by setting up a Tree Map (Thinking Map). I am a Thinking Maps trainer for my school, but with so many useful strategies out there, I often forget to use these. This is the first one I incorporated this year. 

I established the purpose - to classify and define the rituals associated with different age groups in the community. Although more ages are mentioned in the chapter, I only focused on three (1, 9, 12). For age eight, we connected back to the reference to animals in chapter 1 and did a mini-lesson on inference. 

Once they read through the chapter and identified the rituals for the ages, my students had to summarize the information in writing, plus add a text-to-self response: What are your thoughts about receiving a lifelong job at age 12? Since my students are 13 and 14, this freaked them out pretty fast. 

This was not a complex lesson, but it was enough for a short week before a holiday. 

Weekly Learning Logs: Take 2

The children are not understanding the point of the learning log. 

1. There is a great deal of confusion about which class they are supposed to be writing about. I cannot figure this one out. You are in English class; write about English class. When you are in science, write about science. 
2. I keep hearing, "But we didn't learn anything this week." Are you kidding me? I am the hardest working teacher I know, and we didn't learn anything? This week, we worked on vocabulary strategies, identifying Contrasts & Contradictions, making predictions, and explaining what we have learned using complete sentences. Yep, nothing. 
3. The kids want a sentence limit. I keep telling them to write enough to tell me what they learned. Next time, I am going to say, with an echo, "One hundred sentences sentences sentences." 

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I am willing to learn from my knuckleheads, even if they think they are learning nothing from me. So I am going to make some changes for week three. 

I talked to a couple of science teachers about how they are using the learning log. I was told that they are giving the students a specific question about the material covered during the week, then they follow the same rubric that I established. (One teacher did ask why I had not added spelling. I responded that there is only so much we can focus on at one time, and I had to pick and choose my battles on this one.)

The next time we do the learning log, I am going to give some more structure. As I am writing this, I realized that I actually gave my students to focused questions regarding what they had learned from our reading of The Giver, then I asked them to complete the learning log a day later. I really gave the same assignment twice. Since their answers to the following questions were more specific, I will use this format as the learning log the next time we complete this assignment. In addition to the one hundred sentences sentences sentences, of course. 

This assignment focused on the Contrasts & Contradictions that we had
discussed throughout chapter 1.

This one focused on our vocabulary routine for the week.

Milkweed 1-4: Sample Blog Posts

At 2:30 PM Friday afternoon, I was cursing myself to giving this assignment: Create a blog as the character Stopthief in Milkweed. Create an entry that fits the character's life based on the parts we have read. This is not complicated, people!

My school mascot is a bear;
hence the angry bear. 

I went over the assignment Monday so my Pre-AP kids could start thinking about it. By Thursday, they were clueless about everything I discussed Monday. Because I had to reteach everything from Monday, I had to extend the due date for the assignment until the end of class Friday. By the end of class Friday, I had kids who still couldn't figure out what to do. Grrrr!

Between answering the same questions eight gazillion trillion uberillion times, I started looking at the posts from the kids who did understand the lesson. Right at that moment I had hit rock bottom, the sun started shining brilliantly. I am here to share some of that brilliance with you. These are my two favorites:

I love the approach this student took, and I feel like this entry captures
an eight-year-old voice.

This is from one of my quietest students. I was impressed to see his creativity.

Another silly moment

I have some boys with big crushes this year. I don't mind, as long as it does not get out of control. I did have to threaten to remove one boy from my class, but I never want them to feel like a crush is not a normal teenage experience. Heck, I remember my seventh grade crush on Mr. K., my shop teacher. 

Anyway, in chapter 1 of The Giver, a teacher tells Asher that he was not distraught but distracted. The crusher of my class said, "Ms. Foti, I am distraught by your beauty." 

I insisted that he might be distracted, but I certainly do not want him to be distraught over anything regarding me. 

"No, Miss. I'm distraught. It upsets me."

Aw. Poor thing. 

Identifying Contrasts & Contradictions in The Giver (Chapter 1)

Before beginning The Giver, I explained to my students that we would be going through the first chapter slowly, as we often do not give enough thought to all the information being presented in this introductory piece. Since I have read the story, of course I know that there are certain things I want them to catch, so this was very much a baby-step assignment. 

I established the purpose of our reading of chapter 1: focus on identifying Contrasts & Contradictions, a skill we have been working on for weeks now. I liked them before, but I now believe I am head-over-heels in love with Contrasts & Contradictions. Adam Levine may be People's sexiest man alive, but he ain't got nothin' on 25 students asking some deep questions.

Before I present the list, let me preface by saying this: I helped point out some of the CCs, but any discussion afterward was left to my students. There was oohing, aaahing, and oh-my-goshing from them and a lot of shoulder shrugging and playing stupid from me. 

So here is what "we" uncovered in chapter 1:

• Jets flying overhead is not frightening to us, especially since we live in proximity to the DFW airport, but this is not the same for the people in the community. 
• We do not have speaker systems set up in our neighborhoods with unknown voices telling us what to do. We have a speaker system at school, but students often to not even pay attention when an administrator comes on because they deem it unimportant. In the community, these not only exist, but any directions are followed immediately. 
• Being released from class is a good thing, but being released in the community does not appear to be a good thing at all. The kids did discuss what the possibilities might be. They suggested everything from death to banishment to the desert.
• Jonas is concerned about word choice, but we say whatever they think whenever they think it. 
• We do not tend to recognize when apologies are necessary, but in the community, they are required. (The kids also noted that the repetition of the apology was an Again & Again signpost.)
• We don't share feelings with our parents. Eeeew! Jonas and family have to discuss feelings because it is a rule. 
• Jonas and Lily do not know what animals are. (Although they identified this one, many of my students were quite confused about how this could possibly be. I am curious to see how they react when they learn why.)
• Job roles are reversed in the story based on our stereotypical views (nurses are women; law enforcement workers are men). 
• In our culture, we are not given spouses. (This did lead to some discussion of different cultures and religions around the world. I also started giving them classmates and spouses, and they were not happy.)
• In our culture, there is not a limit on the number of kids or specified genders. (Some of the classes discussed that the babies must be given like the spouses because that's the only way this arrangement could happen. As they talked about this, they began to realize that the babies must be made in some unnatural way.)

I am proud of myself for a much better start to teaching this novel than I had last year, and I am proud of my students for showing that their brains do work right before a holiday. 

A Special Moment

I had a special moment with some students from my sixth period class today. I do not mean Church Lady "special" but a truly special moment. We talked about books. 

One student asked me what my favorite book is. The first one to pop in my mind was Emma Donoghue's Room, one that I share with every adult who asks me about books. It is a remarkable, haunting story, and I was explaining to a group of kids that I list it among my favorites because I have never forgotten the story. 

This opened up the flood gates. They were telling me about books they liked, books they didn't like, books they planned on reading, books that are better than the movies. Two even mentioned wanting to read The Lord of the Rings series. They were all talking over one another, and sure, my head was spinning, but I was silently basking in the glory surrounding me. 

They taught me something today. When I mention reading, they groan. When I start talking about specific books and what they are about, the kids light up. I told them about The Maze Runner, The Burn Journals, The Bite of the Mango, and The Fault in Our Stars this afternoon, and they were ready to run out and find them all. 

My passion, my addiction, my need for reading surpasses that of most people. When I can ignite even a flicker of a spark in my students about books, I am on cloud nine. 

______________________________

On a side but related note, I keep hearing my Pre-AP students talking to my academic students about reading Milkweed. I have academic students pleading with me to let them read it.

 I also have a Pre-AP student who finished the book last night. She said she couldn't put it down. 

The Giver: Chapter 1

While my Pre-AP students are reading Milkweed, my academic students will be reading The Giver. Last year, I will honestly admit that I did some of my worst teaching with The Giver. I was frustrated with my students. They refused to read outside of class, impeding the lessons I was trying to cover in class. For the most part, we listened to the book and did very little with it. Of course, when I was doing this, my newly-promoted secondary superintendent was brought to my classroom to view some of the finest teaching our school has to offer. (sigh) Not my best moment, but I refuse to let it happen again. 

Prior to beginning the novel, we will be going through our Texas Literacy Initiative vocabulary routine with the word release. Although I know my kids know this word, I want to put focus on it since it is such an important concept in the novel. We will be viewing the presentation with Nearpod so that I may assess understanding of the term. I am not expecting any issues here. We will come back to discuss this more after reading the first chapter of the book. 

Last year, I began by having my students create their own perfect societies, but it become more of a distraction and never truly connected to the novel the way I had initially intended. This year, I'm throwing that out the window. For chapter 1, we will focus on Contrasts & Contradictions from Notice and Note. They are already familiar with Contrasts & Contradictions, but now we are going to shift away from characters and focus on the setting. I want them delving deeply into the differences between Jonas' world versus our own to see what this "perfect" world is like. 

In preparing the Contrasts & Contradictions lesson, I incorporated Christopher Lehmans' Close Reading Ritual from Falling in Love with Close Reading. The lenses will be focused on the setting of the story. The patterns will be the Contrasts & Contradictions. We will then use this information to create a picture of Jonas' society. 

As with some of my previous lessons, I am going to have my students respond to the presentation questions using Nearpod. By using Nearpod, I ensure that every student submits a response, rather than letting another student answer on his/her behalf. I can skim through their responses and see who is understanding the text and the strategy, as well as who is not. This information is also saved in a report that I can use as needed.

This is definitely a better start from last year's teaching. Ain't nobody comin' back this year to say I ain't doin' my J-O-B!