Resources
Below you will find our OER Units for 7th grade English Language Arts. Please feel free to email us with any questions. We are still working on these units, but feel free to take, tweak, and/or share!
#GoOpen professional development for teachers
I am currently the only teacher in my district teaching solely with #OERs. In order to find myself some partners in sharing, I've begun presenting on district PD days. This is the presentation I have used to let my colleagues in on what's been going on in my classroom. Hopefully a few of them get inspired to begin their own trip down the rabbit hole! I have also given a variation of this presentation at regional #GoOpen events to give administrators an idea of how to support their teachers. If you are looking to introduce teachers to #OER, this is a good place to start.
#eyebombing
I remixed this clever narrative writing lesson to include lessons on point of view and sentence structure. Students had a blast creating little creatures with their googly eyes, and the school enjoyed finding these faces throughout the building.
Link to the slides for you to make a copy & edit --> here.
Grudge Ball
Grudge ball is a competitive review game that my students love to play. This set reviews plot elements as well the Notice & Note signposts. You will also need a trash can, a tennis ball (or similar size ball, or even wadded up paper!), and some tape to mark off the point lines on the floor.
Poetic Novels
During our study of poetry and how writers play with language, students chose a poetic novel to read and analyze. We borrowed poetic novels from libraries across our school district and our own public library. We also used some of our bonus points from book orders to order a few free paperback poetic novels to keep in our classrooms. We aligned our poetic novel unit with a unit on culture in social studies, so all the novels contained main characters of diverse backgrounds. Students chose which novel they wanted to read, then picked several poems to read closely and completed various analysis activities they chose from a choice board. Details, activities, assignments, and rubrics can be found here. Make copies to be able to remix, reuse, and redistribute!
Monsters Are Due on Maple Street: analysis using Pages
My students each have an iPad, and I love using the Pages app to increase their engagement. With Pages for the iPad, students can record video right into the doc. AirDrop makes sharing the template with them easy, and they submit their completed work via our LMS (PowerSchool). For this particular analysis, students were comparing the teleplay of Monsters Are Due on Maple Street with two filmed versions of the classic Twilight Zone episode. Students wrote a paragraph detailing the literary elements that transferred from the teleplay to the episode (things like character development, plot structure, and setting). Then they recorded a video explaining which of the two episodes they preferred. Download the template we used. You need to have the free Pages app installed on an iOS device to open it.
Course shell rubric
Lawrence Public Schools is disrupting the factory model of education through blended and personalized learning. As teachers are granted greater autonomy with curriculum, it became increasingly important to ensure quality. The course shell rubric was created to evaluate courses built into our LMS. Teachers pull from these shells much like a buffet, taking what they want and leaving the rest. As teachers create and add their own content to their course, the rubric serves as a guide for them to ensure that their content is at least as good as what is in the course shell.
Licensing
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