A cool way to end the year-Subbing May 6th

Today I am subbing for an middle school English class. This is for the teacher that emailed me with her lesson plans yesterday. The students are working on a really cool project. They are doing a year in review video in groups of three to four. The students have to cover 4 of the g.l.e.s. They have to list the g.l.e., then create a video that demonstrates the g.l.e. With only one exception, the students are working well together. They are helping each other out, and they are excited about the project. They had to shot videos and pictures, add music, and captions to the videos. They had to story board the video before they got to work with movie maker. Not only that they are really engaged. There is not one student that doesn’t want to do the project. I am going to email the teacher to see if I can get the project packet because I really think that I would like to do this project in the future. Wilhelm says that students remember what they read if they create some artistic representation of it, I wonder if it works with literary concepts. One thing that I think I would do though is divide the g.l.e.s so every g.l.e. is covered, then I would see about combining the group videos into one video so the students have all of the g.l.e.s in one video.

The one exception mentioned earlier was a student that is on a special behavior plan. He wanted to work with the group and do the project, but he was frustrated because his team wouldn’t let him help with what he knew. The person that was working with movie maker, didn’t know what he was doing, and he actually didn’t save what they had worked on correctly and they lost the video they had been working on. At the end of class his group came to him and apologised and asked him to help them put the video together on Monday. I was happy that they apologised to him, but I think it might be too little too late.

I really like the behavior plans that this team has. If a student is not able to handle themselves in class they are removed to another class. It it gets to the point where this is happening often they are assigned to another class until they are able to earn their way back into their normal class. This is part of the b.i.s.t. system. They work their way through the levels then instead of being instilled back to the first level, they have to work their way back. This student is with the teacher I was subbing for, in the morning, but he has earned back some of his classes. This system works on controlling bad behaviors caused by anger or bad habits, like talking during class and gossiping.

Interesting note: It sounds like the middle school is going towards an English curriculum similar to Nancy Atwell’s, meaning the students get to choose what they read. Some of the teachers are worried about how this will work. I think this would be a good thing, but I think it is very important that the English curriculum across the grade levels is consistent, so the jr. high and the sr. high need to find ways to work in more, a lot more, student choice in regards to what they get to read for class.