A Valentine's Day Activity for Middle and High School: Boost Classroom Community with Warm Fuzzies

Fighting the Winter Blues

The winter months can be a bit of a drag for classroom teachers, and morale can really start to drop this time of year (for teachers and students). This is the perfect time of year to amp up your SEL practices and foster those student-teacher and staff relationships. Who doesn’t love a little fun in the midst of winter gloom? Building community in our classrooms is so important when we think about student buy-in, but that community also extends to the faculty and staff of the school as a whole. If you’ve been looking for an idea to brighten up your classroom and build a positive school culture, these SEL Warm Fuzzies have just what you need!

Step One: Get Your Materials Ready

This activity is SO simple and requires very little to set up, and you can easily adapt the set up to meet your needs. That being said, the first thing you need is a bag for each participant. Brown paper bags work great, but if you have something similar go ahead and use those! Students will be able to decorate their bags and add a personal touch. 

Once you have the bags, decide on a place for these to “live”. A bulletin board works great! You’ll staple the bags there for all to see and leave them up as long as you like. 

The next step is to ready your Warm Fuzzy slips. We have some templates ready to go! Just click here and print! 

Step Two: Prep Your Participants

Give students time to decorate their bags. We all know that some of our students will write their names on the bags and be done, but some may want to spend some time making their bags unique. You can set some time aside for this, let them decorate once they finish ongoing assignments, or let them take the bags home to decorate! 

Next, give students the Warm Fuzzy slips, and let them begin to write their notes. Encourage students to write several notes to different classmates, and remind students that the purpose of this activity is to build community and spread some joy around. You could require each student to write a minimum amount of notes, or you could have students write a note for each of their classmates. This depends on you and the amount of time you want to spend on this activity. 

It might be helpful to have some sentence starters for kids who feel stuck on what to write. And remember, the more specific the message the more meaningful the impact! Tell students to think about what stands out to them about their classmates. Maybe it’s the thoughtful discussion points someone always has, or it could be the kind gesture of always having a pencil for someone to borrow. The possibilities are endless!

Step Three: Spread the Warm Fuzzies Around!

Now it’s time to deliver the notes! You can do this all at once or over time. Either way, at the end of the process each student should walk away with an assortment of notes making them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. 

A Bonus IDEA

This activity is so versatile and is something you can do multiple times throughout the year (just be sure to keep the bags 😉). You could also do this with your teacher team, your department, or your whole faculty! Hearing from our peers about the positive things they see in us is always uplifting, and don’t forget to make yourself a bag even if doing this with your students! You’d be surprised at how much those sweet words can make a difference. 

If you’re looking for something to help with teacher morale, whether at the team, department, or even whole school level, this is a great activity for faculty and staff. Community is so important for our classrooms, but it’s also beneficial to build community with other teachers and staff. 

IS SEL AN IMPORTANT FOCUS IN YOUR DEPARTMENT?

Then your next step it to check out my Essential Question Adventure Packs. Each pack is designed to support any classroom text that fits under the umbrella of each question — and it’s supported through an SEL focus. Here’s a peek at one of the latest packs: Why do relationships matter?

LOOKING FOR MORE LIKE THIS? HERE’S WHERE TO GO NEXT!

• 6 Valentine’s Lesson Ideas 

• “You’ve Been Hugged” Valentine’s Day Activity for Staff!

• How to Use Attendance Questions for SEL

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Add some new resources to your toolbox

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How to Lead Your Grade Level Team

Over the past thirteen years of teaching, I have seen the entire spectrum of experiences that come with attempting to build a course curriculum with a group of teachers. At it’s worst, egos and selfishness can create a miserable team environment, but at it’s best, working on a grade level team can reenergize even the most tired souls and make a drastic, positive impact on the education of the students being served.

So you’re leading the team…

Maybe you’ve been asked to lead a grade level team. Maybe you’re on a grade level team that has no appointed leadership and you’re ready to take the reins. No matter how you arrived at this moment and this blog post, you’re probably wondering where to start and what exactly your role should be. As your team works together during this school year, here are a few things to always keep in mind.

LISTEN.

There’s nothing worse than being part of a team and knowing that your leadership never listens to your idea, or worse, never solicits new ideas or conversation. At the end of the year and before any summer revamping starts, I like to send this Google Form out to my team to get feedback on their experiences over the past year. I find that a combination of in-person meetings and email/survey types of communication is great. Some of my teammates are a bit more reticent to talk during a team meeting but have so much to share via email and Google Docs/Forms.

ORGANIZE.

There are a lot of moving parts when working on a curriculum team, and it’s your job to keep them all organized - digitally and physically. My team meets weekly, so I make sure to always have a few things organized for each team meeting:

• An email reminder the day before about our meeting

• A brief agenda in that email with our goals/topics that will be covered

• An ask for any other items from the past week that should be addressed

• During meetings have someone take notes

• Keep your curriculum map/pacing guide updated regularly

• Link common assessments and assignments on the curriculum map so that everything is easy to find in one place - not scattered and hard to find with random titles in Google Drive

• If you are using Google Drive, come up with a simple naming system for documents or folder system so that everyone can find what they need when they need it

• Send out a brief recap of the meeting at the end of the day for all who were unable to attend and so that everyone knows the focus and mission of the upcoming week

• Bring or bookmark the school calendar for every meeting so that as you plan lessons and assessments you can cross-reference dates

CONTROL.

Yep, I said it. These meetings need to be controlled…by YOU. If your team has a habit of chatting off topic for the first fifteen minutes, there’s something you need to handle. Leading a curriculum team means taking on a position of leadership that you might not have taken on before and this can feel quite strange and even intimidating. But remember, you’ve got this. Control the situation by redirecting the conversation to the agenda that everyone got in their emails (see why organization is important?!). When teachers come in to team meetings bashing other teachers or even students, it’s your job to stand up and let them know that kind of attitude is not welcome in the meeting. You are in charge — you’re not a dictator, but you must take responsibility for the quality, productivity, and character that you expect from your team.

SPARK JOY.

Your team is going to have high and low times during your year together, and that is totally normal. As much as you can, find ways to spark joy in your team meetings or even in your interaction with teammates outside of meeting times. Can you remember a birthday? What about sharing a positive student story each week? Is there somewhere for your team to visually celebrate wins? No matter how small, take the time to gear your meetings toward the positive side of experience and frame your time together in terms of making progress toward a collective goal that everyone genuinely cares about.

REMEMBER YOUR WHY.

Why did we start in this profession to begin with? I can guess that for most of us, it was the kids. It’s always the kids. As things in teaching get more and more complicated and inane demands are thrust onto our plates, it’s easy for teachers to start drifting away from their original purpose for joining the force. Keep reminding your team of your WHY. Who is this lesson serving? How does this plan reflect the people in front of us? Are we talking about rigor or busy work? Challenge each other to focus on what’s best for kids - not what’s easier for teachers.

SET AN EXAMPLE

If your team has planned a lesson together and when you teach it the lesson completely bombs, be honest! Share that experience! Being a good leader means having the willingness to “step into the arena” (Roosevelt) and that “arena” is a metaphor for VULNERABILITY (Brene Brown Daring Greatly). Teachers on your team will appreciate you sharing your failures and discussing a rebuild for the next go around.

…AND SHIFT YOUR MINDSET TO “OUR”

When I think back to the glory days of the most productive, cohesive team of teachers I ever worked with, I can pinpoint our success one one common denominator. We stopped saying “my” kids and “your” kids and started saying “our’ kids. We were the English 2 TEAM. These were ALL of our kids. We visited each other’s classrooms - and I mean I legit would unannounced and uninvited walk into my teammate Kyle’s room to announce the most random and unrelated information: “Mr. Etheridge! Last night my cat barfed up last month’s birthday confetti.” Things like that. For one week, we designed a short unit about getting ready for college and we organized a Teacher Swap: each teacher shared her college search journey with each of the sections of English 2 until all students had heard all teacher’s stories. The students became one big group that we, as a team, were trying our best to help achieve the highest success possible. This dynamic didn’t last forever and it was hard to build, but when we got there, it was exactly what education is supposed to be.

Good luck on your curriculum team journey! As always, let me know how I can help!

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Teaching the Poetry Mashup

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If there is one thing that is constant among generations of teenagers, it is the love of music.  And if there’s one thing that English teachers know, it’s that music is the perfect gateway to getting students into poetry.  Today, I’d like to share an awesome poetry/music pairing to try in your own classroom:  Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” meets Patrick Stump’s “This City is My City”.  The Literary Maven has an incredible blog post out about poetry mashups (coming in April!) with lots of suggestions from other ELA teachers, but I wanted to share my mashup here in a bit more detail for you all.

My Glee Mash-up nickname for this lesson is “This City is My City of Broad Shoulders”.  Clever, huh? I thought you’d like that.  When you teach paired poetry, you’re asking something truly unique and rigorous of them: you’re asking them to consider similarities and differences across genres and often across huge time gaps in history.  Asking your students how and why the pieces relate to one another, even just casually, is a beautiful exercise in critical thinking.  But you can construct something more purposeful, too!   I love the mashup of these two pieces and I’d like to discuss why these two pieces are so cool together.  

Stump’s “This City” has lyrics that describe pride in a city despite its flaws and corruption and Sandburg does something very similar in his poem.  Stump writes:

“From every high rise
Down to every slum
From every unethical politician to the wise old beat up bum
My city and I our hearts beat, beat, beat together
When I’m home we both breathe, breathe, breathe together
This place is my home, wherever I go, I, I, I, I, I take it with me”

and Sandburg writes:

“And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”

These two voices, so distant in time and genre, have such a scrappy, unapologetic sense of pride for their cities.  Both poets use a counter argument structure: they acknowledge the faults of their cities, then come right down and defend their homes.  Stump identifies the “unethical politician” while Sandburg references having “seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again”.  The reason I enjoy pairing these two together is because Stump’s version is so simple and approachable.  His language is plain and the song is catchy, so it makes for a nice scaffold.  Once you layer on “Chicago”, the language gets more difficult, but since you’re approaching it in the same context as “This City”, the students already have a frame for the poem.  

As you look through these parallels with students (and there are several more!), I would suggest focusing in on four major aspects of the poems:  the tone, the message, the speakers, and the figurative language.  Depending on your class, you might even narrow that list down to just two things to focus on.  

Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity for some close reading practice?  I have a few ideas to share with you.   Ready?

THREE WAYS TO ENGAGE STUDENTS WITH MASHUPS:

1.  The Mashup Poem

Just like this blog post title, this activity asks students to combine the two works together into a unique poem of their own.  Have you ever had students write a blackout poem?  This concept is similar!  Provide both the poem and the song to students printed out.  Have students place the two pieces side by side.  With a pen, highlighter or sharpie, have students read the poem as if they were blended together across the margins.  For example, in the Sandburg/Stump Mashup, the first line would read: “This city is my city/Hog Butcher of the World”.  As the students read across the two poems like this, they should use their writing utensil to underline the phrases they like the best and start blending their favorite parts together and eliminating some of the text as they go.  By the time they’re done, everyone will have a unique poem even though they all started with the same two sets of text!

2.  Compare/Contrast

For this lesson, I give students a regular ole’ venn diagram, but with a twist.  This venn diagram is sectioned off into the four elements that we focused on an annotated as we were reading.  To use this venn diagram, you could do stations, you could do a jigsaw, or you might even break students up into small groups and have them present what they found.  I would suggest doing one of the sections together as a model and then assign the rest for small group work or homework (depending on their skill level).  Encourage students to write direct lines (textual evidence) in the venn diagram as much as they can!  They should avoid vague statements and summary as they work through the organizer.

3.  Deeper Analysis

Once they’ve finished comparing and contrasting, now they can move on to some writing about their observations.  For this next level part of the lesson, students will choose one element that they identified and defend how and why this similarity or difference is significant.  For example, if the students identified the tone of “This City” as joyful and the tone of “Chicago” as empowered, students would then discuss how that ultimately impacts the message of each poem and makes them different from one another.  This is the part of the lesson that higher level students should work on the most and younger, more inexperienced students should practice with you and be encouraged to try.  Don’t skip this step -- it’s HARD, but it’s IMPORTANT!

What are some other mashups that you’d like to try?  Let me know in the comments!

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Six Ways to Create Warmth in your December Classroom (and still take care of business!)

This month, I've taken on the challenge to be part of the 12 Days of December Blog Hop and Giveaway!  I teamed up with some incredible secondary teachers to write about "comfort and joy" during the holiday season in our classrooms. 

When I think of “comfort and joy” in my classroom around December, what I look forward to most is getting my YouTube fireplace crackling on the screen at the front of my room!

 

This one comes with Christmas music:  

And this one just crackles:

But as we all know, there’s a lot more to teaching in the month of December than just cute holiday sentiments.  This time of year is challenging for so many reasons; from the looming horror of final exams to the downright awful cold weather (remember, Chicago girl here!), December is a teaching challenge of focus, measuring learning from the entire semester, and finding ways to authentically remember the heart of the season in our classrooms.  

Here are SIX ways I tackle the challenges of this tricky teaching month (and keep things warm and cozy, too!):

1:  Plan a White Elephant Holiday Party!

If you’re like me, you’ve been saying “no” to class parties all semester.  This is the one time of year that I give in!  We usually have an awkward calendar day right at the end of the semester, and so I seize this opportunity to let the kids have a party.  And not just a sit around, eat, and stare at each other party...a White Elephant Party!  By having a specific kind of gift exchange, it keeps the class moderately sane (students have to pay attention in order to play the game!) and keeps any socially awkward classes from getting too...socially awkward!

2:  Fun, but meaningful, end of semester review for finals

You’ve covered so much material since August, and finals are right around the corner.  As much as we’d like to just wrap things up and be done, students are going to be anxious about their final grades and getting prepared for their exams.  In the English classroom, there are TONS of fun, warm, and joyful ways to do this!  Consider:

• Create Character Stockings:  In this easy “craftivity”, students choose a character of significance from the semester and design a stocking that fully represents him or her.  The stocking should include both textual evidence and symbolic imagery that encapsulates that character’s most important contributions to the work of literature.  Have students give brief “presentations” of the stocking before you hang them up by the fireplace in your classroom.  This will serve as both a review of important character moments and a speaking and listening grade before the end of the term!

• Try a new techy review game that you haven’t had time to play this semester.  Platforms like Kahoot!, Quizziz, and Quizlet Live are easy to use and energy boosters during the winter blues.

 

3:  Thematic, argumentative writing

Some of you might not have finals until after winter break.  This means that you have to fill all of December with meaningful, rigorous work to keep your kiddos from going bananas.  Why not try out this mini-unit in argumentative writing?  Pose the question:  do the holidays make people more generous or greedy?  Then, using the lesson plan, send students off to search through ten different articles and videos looking for evidence to support each side of the argument.  After a few days of reading and notetaking, challenge the students to write an essay taking a side embedding and using the evidence they’ve found from the provided nonfiction resources.  This could easily take you anywhere from two to six class periods and is sure to keep them both academically focused but also enjoying some humor and seasonally related discussions.

4:  A Decor Update

This is a great time of year to warm up your room with a few simple decor ideas.  Have you seen some of these before?

• I LOVE these Winter Literary Device Posters from Ashley Bible of B’s Book Love.  I have her nature-themed ones and love those too!  These are the perfect wintery touch for any ELA teacher’s classroom.

• Turn your classroom library full of books into a tree!

• Make a classroom fireplace!  Check out this tutorial from Little Running Teacher in the Philippines.  It brightens and warms her classroom right up!

5:  Service Learning Project and/or Field Trip

If you have some time to spare and need to fill it with something meaningful, this is a great time of year to start a service learning project or take a service learning field trip!  I have a great way to get started on a project with Be the Change!  Thinking about a field trip instead?  How about taking your crew to Feed My Starving Children?  This organization is perfectly set up for school trips, they spend time educating students about what they’re doing and why, and they make the volunteering time a blast!

6:  Random Acts of Kindness Challenge

To really get into the spirit of joy and giving, why not challenge your students to complete this Random Acts of Kindness Challenge?  Have students work together as a class and use a class hashtag to share photos on Twitter or Instagram completing each challenge.  Take all of those pictures and throw them into an Animoto video to show at your White Elephant party!  This free download is editable and ready for you completely customize for your own students and school.

Don't forget to check out all of the other amazing secondary bloggers sharing their ideas for creating comfort and joy in your classroom all winter long and be SURE that you enter our amazing giveaway!  We are raffling off gift cards on December 1st, 4th, 8th, and 12th, so be sure to enter early and often to get your shot at some seriously crazy prizes!

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