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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Secrets of an English Teacher: I Don't Have a Classroom Library

It’s true.

I confess:  I am a high school English teacher and I do not have an operational classroom library.  Even more scandalous?  I don't think that giving students choice reading is the most important part of my curriculum (gasp!).

Do I have a classroom full of books and do I grab whatever I can at Goodwill and garage sales?  Heck yes.  But do I have a check out system, or even an organized system in which I’ve read every book on the shelf and make a point to recommend titles to each of my 125 students every other week?  Nope.  I don’t.

And I certainly don’t think it’s wrong to have these things, but after posting my confession in a Facebook thread last night, I faced and read quite a bit of retaliation to the notion that my high school English classroom is not equipped with a library.  A few thoughts:

We have a fantastic school library and librarian.

So this conversation would be pretty different if this wasn’t the case.  Our librarian is a voracious reader and is constantly fighting for funding and purchasing new books (even ebooks and audiobooks!) for our school.  She sponsors our school’s book club.  She comes into anyone’s classroom for a book talk ANYTIME THEY WANT.  She will sit with individual students to get to know them and recommend the right book.  English teachers have a lot of things to do and to provide for their students:  with these resources just one floor beneath my classroom, I’ve learned to let the experts be the experts (in YA literature, specifically).  

I can’t stand most YA literature.

For myself or for my students.  Seriously!  The idea that the English teacher should be constantly reading YA literature to purchase for the classroom library and then recommend to high school students is preposterous to me.  If YA lit is the developmentally appropriate choice for a particular student, I consult with my incredible librarian (see above), with Goodreads, YouTube, and even social media.  Rather than me reading dozens of YA books, I try to teach the students how to find books that will best suit them.  I show them these sites, introduce them to the right people, and have them talk to each other.  What I spend my time reading and recommending to students are things that will challenge them:  I send students to documentaries on Netflix and YouTube, I help them download free podcasts on iTunes, I print off articles from The Atlantic and sometimes even The New Yorker.  I find texts (not just novels) that a kid would never have found on his or her own.  By the time students have reached my classroom, they are 15 and 16 years old.  For many of them, YA literature is a bridge that leads backward: protagonists tend to be just a little too young and the writing just a little too easy.  While I would never tell a student not to read a YA book, I’m just not putting it at the top of MY huge teacher to-do-list.  Students will find great YA books, but I don’t think they’ll find a Malcom Gladwell podcast just by chance.  

A literacy-rich environment ≠ a classroom library.

It seems like this was thrown around a lot in defense of teachers having individual libraries:  “Students need a literacy-rich environment!”.  Absolutely!  But that goes way beyond a collection of books on a bookshelf!  That means poetry and word walls, inspirational authors photos and maps of the world.  “Print-rich” and “literacy-rich” are completely achievable even if a teacher chooses not to maintain a classroom library or “reading-nook”, at least at the high school level.  

Choice reading is not a priority in my classroom.

I know:  another mortal sin confessed by an English teacher.  Trust me, I’ve read tons about choice.  I love Gallagher and Atwell and the other experts out there, but after years of experience in my school with my 10th graders, I’ve decided that year-long independent reading is not what’s most important in my classroom.  Our focus is on an inquiry-driven, well-rounded language arts experience.  Each of our units is shaped by an essential question and then within the unit, texts are selected (some by the teachers, some by the students) to help students enter into discussion of this question based on their reading experiences.  During the year, we do whole-class novels (see below for more on that!), a debate unit (reading lots of research), poetry, literature circles, a service learning project, Shakespeare and independent reading.  Choice reading drives two of these units (the lit circles and our service learning project), but our school year is anchored by common experiences and a curriculum written by the teachers.  For me and my team, we are constantly weighing the needs of our students and the urgency of college being only two years away.  College reading is not choice reading and it’s certainly not always interesting.  If students are only reading high-interest novels or the novels that they want to read, how are they going to handle their first college packet of articles?  Probably like this:

1. Panic

2. A trip to Walgreens to buy more highlighters

3. Skimming

4. Panic

5. Reading the bold titles

6. A first attempt

7. Frustration

8. Quitting

If a student's entire literature experience is driven by choice and personal preference, I’m not sure we’re raising the kind of generation that will succeed in problem-solving or critical thinking.  Choice should certainly be used as motivation and as a way of supporting struggling readers, but the average high school sophomore (in my experience) needs more than choice and independent reading time.  

I still believe in the whole-class novel.

Passionately.  But I understand that when you hear whole-class novel, you’re probably picturing what your own experience was in high school:  reading quizzes, lists of discussion questions, annotating homework, and a chapter by chapter pacing calendar.  That’s not what it looks like in most high school classrooms anymore!  Let me take you through the first unit of my school year:

Unit 1:  To What Extent is America a Dystopia?  

Each of our units is framed by an essential question and since we wanted to focus the beginning of the year on dystopia, we crafted this question.  An essential question gives the curriculum a frame and a lens for the students to work from.  While the students didn’t “choose” the question, we, the teaching team wrote the question and chose the genre because of its popularity in YA fiction, in film, and in its eerie and disturbing current events connections.  From this question, we then select the texts.  These shift and get updated every year, but this year in a 9-week unit, students will read/watch/hear:

• “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut

• “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin

• “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury

• “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury

• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

• “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders (published in The New Yorker October 15, 2012 issue)

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• Limetown (a radio-drama via Two-Up Productions)

• Video (extended clips) from Wall-E, Elysium, The Hunger Games, and “Sight”

If you’re familiar with even just a few texts on this list, you’ll recognize how amazingly rich AND high interest this reading list is!  Also, this list doesn’t include any of the current event news articles that we will pull as the unit is actually happening - I’m pretty positive there will be some engaging stories about North Korea, President Trump, Russia, and other dystopian-esque realities on the horizon for the fall of 2017.  So, no, we won’t be choosing what we read, but on this list is a text and an opportunity for readers at all different levels.  Fahrenheit 451 is the core text of the unit, but as you can see, students will have the opportunity to learn about our essential question from a huge variety of angles.  Assessments for the unit include a socratic seminar, a synthesis essay, and a sprinkling of odd-one-out quizzes.  Variety, intensity, depth, and critical thinking how we want our curriculum to be shaped so that students at all levels feel challenged and come to understand their own worlds in a brand new light. If you’re interested in further reading, Kristin Bowers elegantly defends whole-class novels in her blog post: In defense of the whole-class novel as does teacher-author Tracee Orman in her post Defending the Whole-Class Novel.

Caring, passionate, and professional teaching is what counts.

No matter your stance on choice reading vs whole-class novel reading, or any other education debate for that matter, the most important thing I keep hearing all around Facebook are the voices of educators who genuinely care not only about their students, but about their own professional development.  Strong opinions about reading means that we have established a vibrant community of teachers that are talking and listening to one another and reading about our profession.  This, above all, is what I’m most proud of in the online teacher community.  But we must be careful to not be martyrs and to not qualify what "good" or "bad" teachers are based on the contents of their physical classroom space. 

After ten years of teaching my population at my school, I can only offer a perspective from my experiences.  What I’ve come to stand by is a goal to continually provide opportunities for students to be in conversation about what they are reading and what they are thinking.  Yes, I would love for my students to be life-long readers and devour book after book, but realistically and more importantly I want them to be life-long thinkers.  Critical thinkers. Critical voters.  Through inquiry-based units, a wide variety of challenging texts, I’ve seen great success - it hasn't been a necessity for me to maintain a full-on classroom library to create powerful and important reading experiences for students, and for the new teachers out there who are seeing this all over Pinterest and Instagram, it can be pretty daunting.  For teachers reading YA books all summer long and performing the role of teacher and librarian at your schools (so many of which I know don’t have the resources we do), my hat is off to you.  Keep doing what you’re doing - I admire you!  And for those of you out there feeling like failures for not having a classroom library or a huge stash of books to share with kiddos, worry not.  Grab your favorites from home, maybe take one trip to Goodwill, and feel good about a small collection in your room somewhere.  There are so many ways to challenge and connect with kids over literature.  Keep researching, keep talking, and keep loving what you do.  Our kids need every single one of you.

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If you are looking for resources to help you teach a dystopian literature unit, you might like An Introduction to Dystopia:

If you want to learn more about Essential Question based curriculum design, check out Teach Box:

How to Work with Words Without a Workbook

How to Teach Vocabulary Effectively and Efficiently at the High School Level

In order for our students to succeed across subject areas, we must all acknowledge the critical importance of vocabulary instruction.   There are so many best practices out there, so many specialists, and so many approaches, it can feel daunting to choose a streamlined and effective strategy for your classroom.  No matter your favorite method or style, I have a thoughtful yet efficient strategy for you to try in your class this year.

Let’s start with the routine: bell work.  Most high school teachers have seen the merits of implementing bell work and I’d argue that this is the best and most consistent way to have daily vocabulary practice without having to give up tons of class time.  When the bell rings, you need something that students can do independently, quietly, and quickly.  Why not have them try using the Vocabulary Digital Interactive Notebook?  

Here’s how it works:  you provide students with your list of words at the beginning of the unit.  Then, daily, students take out their 1:1 devices (should be Google-ready), open their Vocabulary Digital Interactive Notebooks, they choose a vocabulary activity (there are eight of ‘em pre-loaded), they work on the selected activity for 4-5 minutes, and then you’re ready to move on with the rest of class!  

Here’s how to get started:

1.  Create your Vocabulary Units

The first thing you’ll need to do is decide on your word lists.  Some of you may already have pre-selected words for your units, and others of you might have more flexibility, but either way, you are the one responsible for deciding on the words and the length of each unit.  When you’ve got your word lists ready to go, we can introduce the Vocabulary Digital Interactive Notebook!

2.  Train Students on the Routine

To use this notebook effectively, students should be trained on the bell work routine that you have determined to be the most efficient.  In my room, that means when the bell rings, students are in their seats with Chromebooks open.  At the front of the room, I display (from my computer) whatever specific directions I have for the day and the students know to check there and then begin.  They open up their Vocabulary Digital Interactive Notebooks, follow the directions, and in 4-6 minutes, they’re done with that day’s vocabulary practice.

3.  Model and Practice Each Activity (and add your own!)

Inside the notebook, you’ll find eight different practice activities for students to use with one or multiple words from the word list.  At the beginning of the year (or when you implement this activity) it’s critical that you model and practice each of the graphic organizers and activities in the notebook.  Oftentimes, during Unit 1, teachers spend time teaching each of the activities one by one before making the bell ringers and independent activity in Unit 2.  Don’t forget:  since this notebook is completely editable, you can add any of your other favorite quick vocabulary activities that you want before you assign it to the students!  

4.  Add Your Own Assessments

Vocabulary study requires all different kinds of assessments, and this particular post and product don’t provide this part.  Make sure that you and your team decide on appropriate formative and summative assessments to use along the way.

5.  Keep it Fresh

There are lots of ways to keep this activity fresh throughout the year.  Here are just a few things teachers have tried:

• Pick a few days a week to have students work with a partner.  This gives students a chance to talk about the words and word meanings rather than always working solo.  Marzano (and other vocabulary experts) have made it abundantly clear that students need multiple exposures to words in order to fully learn them.  Partner and small group work make this possible!

• In a given week, divide the list into parts.  Ask students to focus on the same 3-4 words ONLY but go through every activity.  This ensures mastery of the words, not just practice.  The next week, students could rotate to the next grouping of words.

• If you’re assigning this notebook through Google Classroom, you will automatically have access in your Drive to each student’s notebook.  Occasionally, project a few notebooks from students that have done exemplary work.  This ensures students know what quality looks like and helps them to not get lazy with the routine.  You can also print out notable work directly from their Google slideshows!

Ready to get started?  Then what are you waiting for!  Pick up your own digital, edible copy of the Vocabulary Digital Interactive Notebook today!

How to Design a Poetry Unit that Doesn't SUCK

Have you ever done a Google search for "poetry ideas" to teach in your high school English classroom?  Let me spoil those search results for you - THEY'RE LAME!  Poetry, especially at the high school level, it too important to be treated as a coloring activity, or worse, ignored completely.

So many of the poetry resources out on the internet and on Pinterest are, quite honestly, not rigorous at all.  If you're truly looking to teach poetry (like, more than just rhyme scheme and a few adorable forms), you're not going to be happy with the coloring-book, bubble-lettered poetry activities out there.  And maybe that's the problem:  studying poetry isn't an activity.  It's hard work that requires a lot of patience, confidence (on the part of the teacher), and clear teaching targets.  Don't get me wrong...poetry can and should be fun!  But we need to be very careful, as high school English teachers, to not oversimplify our poetry study.  If you need help designing your poetry curriculum for this year, I've got a few things for you to keep in mind...

Choose Your Targets

What will the goal of this unit be?  Do you want students to study a particular genre or school of poetry like the Harlem Renaissance or Romanticism?    Do you want a diverse array of poetry so that you can focus on the basic analytical skills needed to approach any poem?  Are you considering a mini-unit focusing on just one poet's works?  All of these approaches are very exciting and relatively easy to organize, so decide on the approach you like and the targets you hope to achieve.  This will help keep the unit focused on a skill or two that you can measure at the beginning and end (pretest/posttest).  If you're using Common Core to write your targets, you won't find a lot of poetry-friendly areas, but certainly consider the language standard:

“CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.9-10.5
Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.”

— www.corestandards.org

If you have enough time in this unit, you might also consider adding in a few of the speaking and listening standards (have students perform and read their work for an audience) or even the writing standard about publication.  If you're lucky enough to not have to "prove" you're teaching "standards", still make sure you have a few focus goals for the unit:  what are the things you want students to be able to do once they're finished with the few weeks you've studied poetry?  

Decide on an Analysis Tool

There are lots of approaches to teaching poetic analysis.  If you've been teaching for a while, you might be familiar with TPCASTT.  I can remember being a student hating TPCASTT (who knows why), but I do have an alternative analysis tool that I can share with you.  As a senior in college, poetry instruction in the high school classroom became my focal point in my seminar research.  Here I began the process of creating The Big 6, and I have since refined it over many more years of teaching.  Essentially, The Big Six is an open circle that invites students into a dialogue with each other and with the poem.  We tackle each poem with The Big Six in a variety of ways.  Sometimes I have students move around the room stopping at each Big Six Station to talk and annotate about each element.  Other times, we vote on the top two we want to examine for a particular poem.  If you want to know more,  I have some free lesson ideas, graphics, and handouts here.

Select Your Poems Carefully

This is a task taken too lightly by many teachers.  Here is where you hold great power - are you going to keep stuffing the old, white, dead, male cannon down students' throats?  I suggest you make every effort to diversify your unit's anthology of poems.  Keeping in mind the targets of your unit (do not abandon these!), consider a global map of poets from many places.  Teach female poets.  It's OKAY if you don't teach Frost.  He'll be fine with it.  Have the chutzpah to try some lesser known poets, even some LIVING poets, to teach your students.  The poems you teach shape your students' perception and attitudes about poetry.  Here are some tips to help with this monumental task:

• Try pairing contemporary and old school poetry together:

  • Willie Perdomo "Where I'm From" and Carl Sandburg "Chicago" (both about where the poets are from, both urban landscapes)

  • Poetry & New York Times nonfiction

  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Juanes (Columbian music superstar) "A Dios Le Pido" (both poems about senseless death, both have a prayer-like feel)

• Consider some of these rockstar contemporary poets:

  • Billy Collins

  • Denise Duhamel

  • 2Pac

  • Matthew Graham

  • Lamar Jorden

  • Patricia Smith

• Check out these female poets you know, but probably don't already have in the curriculum:

  • Emily Dickinson

  • Sylvia Plath

  • Maya Angelou

  • Elizabeth Bishop

  • Gwendolyn Brooks

  • Margaret Atwood

  • Nikki Giovanni

Make Sure Your Students Write

No matter what you do in your unit, make sure there is room set aside for students to try their hand at their own poetry.  You don't need to organize any formal instruction for this -- seriously!  The best way to teach students how to write poetry is to show them great mentors.  Your directions can be as simple as "Now, try your own version of "Phenomenal Woman".  What is "Phenomenal" about you that you'd like to celebrate?  Experiment with your own version for homework tonight".   It's that simple.  

If you'd like to spend more time with students writing, you might consider this 30 Poems in 30 Days challenge in my shop.  I have 30 types of poems ready for students to try as well as a simple digital interactive notebook for the students to use.  If you want help with SLAM POETRY or some POETRY PROJECT IDEAS, I've got you hooked up there, too.

Need help getting started with slam poetry?

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That about wraps it up here, folks.  Remember, the fact that you're here reading this post means that you care about poetry instruction.  We must be powerful forces in our English departments - for so many students, high school is the place where poetry goes to DIE.  We can't let that happen.  It's just too important.  Teaching poetry helps students be more analytical across so many other kids of literature, it stimulates creativity, and it brings them in touch with so many more writers and great moments in our world's history.  Let me know in the comments below what you're teaching in your poetry units!

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