I apologize for going so long without posting! Teaching is very time-consuming, as you can imagine, as is traveling. I'll try to be more on top of things in the future!
The past two months here have flown by; I can hardly believe we're halfway into March already. But the time has flown in a good way ... largely because I'm so enjoying my time here. I've been spending a lot of time teaching; while I haven't taken over completely yet, I've been teaching three days a week while my master teacher Jenny teaches Mondays and Fridays. This gives me time to observe her as well as other teachers two days out of the week, which is very valuable.
One of my favorite things I've been doing with my students so far has to be our poetry unit. This past week in particular we worked on content in poetry, including subject, theme, tone, and diction. We started by going over Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken as a class and then broke into groups to analyze other poems, several of which I found on Billy Collins' site Poetry 180, which I love. Each group of four students had a different poem to analyze such as "Hope" by Emily Dickinson, "Turtle" by Kay Ryan, "The Bagel" by David Ignatow, "The Bat" by Theodore Roethke, and "The Trees" by Philip Larkin. I tried to find poems that were fairly short and accessible to seventh graders and that included vivid imagery. Each group then had to create a "miniposter" using construction paper we had in the class about the poem, including its subject, theme, tone, and five words or phrases they believed contributed to the poem's meaning. The students ate it up. They seemed to love working in groups, and they were also interested in the subject matter of the poems; they seemed to grasp pretty easily the point of the lesson. After presenting their posters to the class, I put them up around our room, which finally has some color and shows the students' work! I could tell they were proud to have their work on display, too. This is definitely a lesson I will teach again.
I've also enjoyed teaching writing. We've only had time for one writing assignment so far, but I certainly hope to do more next quarter. The assignment was called "My Territory," and it required each student to write a five-paragraph descriptive essay about a place that has special meaning to them, that they consider their territory. We did most of our writing in class, brainstorming, writing introductions, and going over the five-paragraph essay structure, and I emphasized description and sensory detail, asking students to explain how things in their territory look, sound, smell, feel, and even taste. What makes their territory different than others'? If they are writing about their bedroom and they include information about their bed, desk and closet, how is their bedroom different than other bedrooms that have the same setup? Obviously if they consider a place "their territory," it must reflect their personality in some way.
The results of this project were impressive. Some students produced beautiful writing ... a couple about a grandmother's house, a scary one about an abandoned garage, a vivid essay about the beach. I learned a lot not only about my students' writing ability through these essays, but also about their backgrounds and their interests, as the assignment had enough structure for my purposes but also gave them freedom to write about a topic that held meaning for them. This is another project I plan to reuse in the future.
So there's some more detail about how my classes are going. Travel on the weekends has been fun as well. A couple weekends ago a group of us went to Monteverde for the ziplining ... scary but extremely fun and exhilirating. And of course the cloud forest is beautiful, like nothing I'd seen before. Tomorrow my family arrives for a weeklong visit; I'm hoping to do some day trips with them while they're here and possibly spend a couple days at Arenal, a volcano a couple of hours away.
Hasta luego!
The past two months here have flown by; I can hardly believe we're halfway into March already. But the time has flown in a good way ... largely because I'm so enjoying my time here. I've been spending a lot of time teaching; while I haven't taken over completely yet, I've been teaching three days a week while my master teacher Jenny teaches Mondays and Fridays. This gives me time to observe her as well as other teachers two days out of the week, which is very valuable.
One of my favorite things I've been doing with my students so far has to be our poetry unit. This past week in particular we worked on content in poetry, including subject, theme, tone, and diction. We started by going over Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken as a class and then broke into groups to analyze other poems, several of which I found on Billy Collins' site Poetry 180, which I love. Each group of four students had a different poem to analyze such as "Hope" by Emily Dickinson, "Turtle" by Kay Ryan, "The Bagel" by David Ignatow, "The Bat" by Theodore Roethke, and "The Trees" by Philip Larkin. I tried to find poems that were fairly short and accessible to seventh graders and that included vivid imagery. Each group then had to create a "miniposter" using construction paper we had in the class about the poem, including its subject, theme, tone, and five words or phrases they believed contributed to the poem's meaning. The students ate it up. They seemed to love working in groups, and they were also interested in the subject matter of the poems; they seemed to grasp pretty easily the point of the lesson. After presenting their posters to the class, I put them up around our room, which finally has some color and shows the students' work! I could tell they were proud to have their work on display, too. This is definitely a lesson I will teach again.
I've also enjoyed teaching writing. We've only had time for one writing assignment so far, but I certainly hope to do more next quarter. The assignment was called "My Territory," and it required each student to write a five-paragraph descriptive essay about a place that has special meaning to them, that they consider their territory. We did most of our writing in class, brainstorming, writing introductions, and going over the five-paragraph essay structure, and I emphasized description and sensory detail, asking students to explain how things in their territory look, sound, smell, feel, and even taste. What makes their territory different than others'? If they are writing about their bedroom and they include information about their bed, desk and closet, how is their bedroom different than other bedrooms that have the same setup? Obviously if they consider a place "their territory," it must reflect their personality in some way.
The results of this project were impressive. Some students produced beautiful writing ... a couple about a grandmother's house, a scary one about an abandoned garage, a vivid essay about the beach. I learned a lot not only about my students' writing ability through these essays, but also about their backgrounds and their interests, as the assignment had enough structure for my purposes but also gave them freedom to write about a topic that held meaning for them. This is another project I plan to reuse in the future.
So there's some more detail about how my classes are going. Travel on the weekends has been fun as well. A couple weekends ago a group of us went to Monteverde for the ziplining ... scary but extremely fun and exhilirating. And of course the cloud forest is beautiful, like nothing I'd seen before. Tomorrow my family arrives for a weeklong visit; I'm hoping to do some day trips with them while they're here and possibly spend a couple days at Arenal, a volcano a couple of hours away.
Hasta luego!
