A New Beginning to a New Beginning

Where to begin? After 3 weeks of teaching grade 7/8, reorganization has taken place and I have been moved schools---- and I am now teaching a grade 7 class. On Thursday, I received the call, left my classroom at 4:00pm and headed to my new school for Meet the Teacher Night. It's really all a blur at this point! Ha! I am excited to be back in a permanent system position, but I have an overwhelming sense of guilt leaving the class I just taught for 3 weeks. Bittersweet..... But feeling VERY grateful for this opportunity.

Before leaving we really dove into some great work.....

I introduced my class to Expository Writing- I colour coded the introduction to show the students how to weave their subtopics into their writing. I find most students have a very hard time organizing their ideas and do not know where to start. This seemed to help them quite a bit.

We used this template and created a generic example as a class about a Dog - Buddy.

Then the students did the following:

1.) Brainstormed at least 5 topics they were interested in.

2.) Chose one of their favourite topics-- A topic they knew A LOT about.

3.) Created subtopics under their topic.

4.) Brief brainstorm with jot notes.

5.) Began creating draft.

I really like to have the kids use paper for brainstorming and the lap tops for their draft and good copies so that they can save be saved on their GoogleDocs. account.

*With hopes of created a virtual writing portfolio.

It makes it easy for them to work on their writing at home without forgetting books and

memory sticks.

If your students are working on computers frequently, GoogleDocs (Google Apps for Education) might be something worth checking out.

Also this week, I taught the students how to highlight and summarize large bodies of text-- We used newspaper articles to highlight key facts, important information and main ideas.

Each student chose articles of their choice and we used this as our "Reading Responses" this week.