LONGEST WEEK OF MY LIFE!!! Here's my crazy Five for Friday link-up with Doodle Bugs Teaching.
Summer School began on Monday, bright and early, with the 7/8 split Movie Makers class in the morning, and English in the afternoon with my adorably evil PUEO Program students. In the Movie Makers class, the students were given the assignment of making a movie trailer in the genre of their choice. Naturally, all of the movies involved murder, and over half also involved some zombie or other monster of choice.
Kids + cameras + wigs = so many laughs. On Wednesday, we started to get into The Giver in our afternoon classes! The kids LOVE the book, even though they've only read a few chapters so far. We played freeze vocabulary and a few other games to help them shed the whole "I don't want to be in school during summer" attitude. I think it worked!
On Thursday, we started the I Ku Wa (stand and deliver) show and tell portion of the afternoon, having all of the "kumu" (teachers) perform first to give the students a few good examples. Having 22 7th graders sit still and listen so attentively was an amazing sight to behold! They absolutely loved listening to their teachers talk about something that they are passionate about, whether it be their college experiences, an extracurricular activity, or places they've traveled to. I know these next few weeks are going to fly by.
After having a week of "fun learning" as our kids have begun to call it, they had to sit down and take a 40-minute test. They weren't too thrilled, but we made up for it on Friday by giving them cookies and playing on the playground for half of the class period after discussing their test, homework, and vocabulary. They earned it, and it is summer after all! I'm so excited to continue teaching these lovely students for the rest of the 5 weeks. Even though my college education has prepared me for some of the events I've encountered with these rascals in this week alone, I know that my students will be the best teachers of what teaching in a real classroom is going to be like.
Props to middle school teachers; if these kids are crazy during the summer, I can't imagine how they are during the regular school year.
Freeze Vocabulary?! That sounds awesome. How does that work?
ReplyDeleteHey Sarah! So we have a pretty lengthy vocab list, and to review them, we put them all on the board so the kids could see them, and had them walk/skip/dance/etc. around the classroom while music was playing. When the music stopped, everyone had to freeze where they were, and they had to stay frozen until a classmate could define the word and another classmate had to CORRECTLY use it in a sentence. They had fun with it, especially since they're competing for points for an end-of-summer treat (girls vs boys). :)
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