Phew … The First Week Sets the Stage

First week of school

This is the first year that I can remember that we started school on a Monday and went five days to Friday. Normally, we come mid-week for a few days and then hit the ground running the next week. Instead, we had five full days and now a three-day weekend before coming back to a short week.

I admit: I was exhausted yesterday afternoon.

But I think my new students – 76 sixth graders — are wonderful, and engaged already. Here’s a bit of what we accomplished in our first five days of school:

  • Community Building (but I wish we had time to have done more … I will write another time about schedule changes this year that have taken away from this)
  • Created accounts and created avatars in our webcomic site
  • Finished up an introductory webcomic (an activity called Pro Card), which gets us ready to dive into our first year real project next week, called Dream Scenes
  • Did two writing prompts, including a creative writing/expository writing/art element about an imaginary treehouse
  • Introduced vocabulary and set the bi-weekly system in motion
  • Read a short story and began to connect with literary concepts (protagonist/antagonist, foreshadowing, etc.)
  • Worked on an organizational chart for planning a literature response piece, which will get written next week
  • Laughed a lot and had students feeling like writers

That last one is important, even if it is not on the standards. It sets the stage for all the hard work and deep writing I hope we can accomplish as the year progresses.

Peace (on Saturday),
Kevin

 

 

6 Comments
  1. Do you ever wonder what an act of utter faith the classroom is? I am thinking of all the stuff you did this week with them and all the stuff i did with mind over these first two weeks and it occurs to me that no matter how much I tell them why we are doing it, they still must have faith. They don’t know and mostly cannot know. Their faith is a gift beyond measure and amounts to a key to the highway of their souls. Yes, and we are all riding our little mopeds into the semester.

    antispam: “rigid non”: Professor Antispam has never been so oblique as to argue that a rigid object can be a non object. Yet…there it is rigid non means any digital text. Words are rigid in external form with letters and rigid internally with meaning. Damn.

  2. “Laughed a lot and had students feeling like writers.”
    That right there is proof of a successful week and a job well done!
    Enjoy some rest.
    Moira

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