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Indelible Footprints  Last year, Mrs. Bauer and the Art Club painted the wall in the back of the classroom. Above the mural which showcases "footprints in the sands of time" is a quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time." Over the years, I will ask a few students from each graduating seventh grade class, who are nominated and voted on by their peers, to sign their names next to a footprint indicating the positive, indelible footprint their peers feel they will leave on their communities and the world around them. Each new class who walks into this room will also see the students chosen in previous years. These students serve as strong role models as the type of person who impacts and inspires others to live more meaningful lives. Please join me in congratulating the '07-'08 recipients and '08-'09 recipients of this honor. Click "More" to see their pictures. More... Cyrano de Bergerac Mrs. Gabriel's class presents....  For more pictures, click More... Stargirl Unit We all have natural reflective thoughts while reading any text. During our unit of Stargirl, students will be paying attention to those thoughts and challenging themselves towards developing higher levels of thinking. Students will be taking post-it notes as they read while focusing on: (1) Raising questions while reading, (2) Responding to interesting quotes, (3) Making connections to the text (text to self, text to text and text to world), (4) Exploring new or intriguing vocabulary, and (5) Making characteristic inferences. For a further description of this process, click here Reading with Post-it Notes For the template of developed post-it note comments, click here Post-it Note Templates To help us understand this process, students practiced with the poem "No Time for the Blues." Below are examples of developed student post-it notes discussed in class. "Blues" Post-it Note Comments While strengthening their own individual reading skills, students will be working as a community of learners to benefit from each other's comments. Each day, students will post their comments around the room so they can see what their classmates are also thinking while reading this book.   Be An Original "Several times in those early weeks of September, she showed up in something outrageous. A 1920s flapper dress. An Indian buckskin. A kimono. One day she wore a denim miniskirt with green stockings, and crawling up one leg was a parage of enamel ladybug and butterfly pins. 'Normal' for her were long, floor-brushing pioneer skirts" (10). Stargirl dresses as an individual. As we read Stargirl, we watch how MAHS reacts to her because of her style and her unique personality. As a social experiment that relates to this book, students are challenged to dress outside their comfort zone in an original way. As they do so, they journal the comments and looks they receive, as well as their own feelings about their look throughout the day. Our class discussions based on this assignment have already been eye-opening. Below are a group of students dressed outside their own individual comfort zones.  For more pictures click More... Create a Card Assignment The Create a Card assignment will wrapup our Stargirl unit. The objective is to create a homemade card for someone else in the seventh grade. Students will have the task of drawing a student's name and secretly finding out something about the student whose name they draw. Then, students create an appropriate card for that person. The Create a Card activity connects to Stargirl in Spinelli's book. “…And cards of many sentiments. She made her own cards. She wasn’t a great artist. Her people were stick figures. The girls all had triangle skirts and pigtails. You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a school child’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name” (112). Below are some examples of cards created by last year's students.  To see more pictures of students and cards click More... Literary Terms Flip Book For students' third IR project, they created a Literary Terms Flip Book after reading a book considered to be a classic. Classics are well-known books that were written 50+ years ago. These are books with memorable stories and characters that have withstood the test of time. Below are example of this year's Flip Books.    For the book project, click Flip Book IR Project For book recommendations, click Classics Book Recommendations For more flip book pictures, click More... Student Stories and Harris Burdick Mysteries During third quarter, we challenge our inferential, analytical and creative thinking by studying several intriguing pictures from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. For extra credit, students type stories to accompany these pictures. To see these pictures and read examples of student's creative writing, click... More... Making Inferences: Harris Burdick Mysteries Once we have practiced making inferences with several pictures, we use The Mysteries of Harris Burdick to further our study of inferences. The picture below is titled "Uninvited Guests." "His heart was pounding. He was sure he had seen the doorknob turn."  For the rest of the Harris Burdick pictures click More... Mood Presentations To help us better understand mood, students were given short literary passages from contemporary young adult books. Once students determined the mood of these short passages, they had to select music clips that reflect the same mood. Then, students read their passages while the music they chose as accompaniment played in the background. Look below for an IMOVIE of student presentation examples. Download the Movie Here! Stories Worth Studying Texts we will be studying this year include: "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe "Thank You, Ma'am" by Langston Hughes "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell "The Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson excerpts from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs excerpts from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" by William Carlos Williams "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by e.e. cummings Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand *please note that texts are not limited to the above selection and are always subject to change |