Monday, September 19, 2016 (Day #19)

Post date: Sep 19, 2016 7:57:55 PM

Today is Pirate Day, and boy was I teaching like a Pirate. I tried a bunch of new things in order to make my classrooms just a little more interesting.

In Literature 9 we started out with our funny Monday video, and then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's butler showed up - Geeves. He instructed the class that they were invited to a dinner party where they could eat, drink, and mingle. While mingling, they should share information about a story. On the back of the invitations were different sections of the story "The Sniper" and they were to try and put the story together. With that, they filled in a discover worksheet. We returned to Room 111 and worked on the notes related to our Irony Workshop. It was fun mingling and eating and sharing with this great group of students.

English 10 is all about the Past, Present, and Future speech. I'm learning a lot about the sophomores, yet I'm yearning for more. Several of the speeches lack the concrete details needed. We're going to have to work on getting deeper. We've also started our grammar review. Today we started with subject/verb/ and direct object. I'm fully convinced we'll have to do these exercises for a few weeks, but that's o.k. Review never hurt anyone.

First in American Government - over 200 shares of our video reaching 22,000 people with 11K views! That's amazing. Who would have thought we were an Internet sensation. As I said in class, maybe Ellen will have us on! Then we played a game of Survivor. They were divided into two teams - the Kuonea and the Watu tribes. We played a game similar to a punch game (cups with questions in, punch it, answer it, and claim it.) When they had four in a row, winning tribe, and off to tribal council we went. I then gave a situation and they needed to come up with what their government would do in that situation. The worst plan was then voted off the island by the other tribe. Everyone seemed to have a good time (I know I did), and hopefully they will be ready for another round on Wednesday.

Despite the craziness of this past weekend (my husband in the hospital), I think I put together some pretty "pirate-ish" lessons. I have to admit I was pretty proud of myself. Let's see if I can keep it up!