School begins day after tomorrow.

These are the thoughts taking over my head right now:

* May I succeed in drawing the new students out of their “shells”, in a positive way.

 

* May I manage to employ an emotional sifter that lets the really good things about being a teacher get through while barely letting the bad aspects affect me.

 

* May the students understand that we need to work together and that they must invest some effort. Simply believing in success is not enough…

* May I keep the students alert (and awake!)

* May I not spend all my late evenings on school work!

 

Wishing everyone an energizing, interesting, satisfying and healthy new school year!

 

I actually remember the book “I remember Mama” by Kathyrn Forbes very well, even though I read it when I was about 10 years old. Two things about it left a deep impression on me.

There was a part there about one of the children being hospitalized and how Mama took a job as a cleaning lady at the hospital so she could spend time with the child. I clearly remember how absolutely horrified I was that parents weren’t allowed to be beside their sick children (I later encountered this in Angela’s Ashes and learned that this was common here too, many years ago). Even as a mother I still can’t fathom how the medical establishment ever came up with such an idea.

The other thing that impressed me very much as a child was that the woman had written such a successful book about her own mother! No dramatic adventures in far off lands, no detectives or magical lions. It was an eye opener!

This year I’m going to teach a really simplified short version of the story to “seriously struggling” deaf and hard of hearing learners in the 11th grade, going for the lowest level of our matriculation exams, known as the three-point level. The hospital scene is out, by the way. Just as well!

These are students who have a lot of trouble dealing with texts in L1. Long texts frighten them in any language. My approach is to give the students an “anchor” . The following activity helps them “visualise” the first two paragraphs of the story. Not only will they know who is whom and where the story takes place, but those screens shots from the movie trailer will help them understand the time period. I already know which of my students is going to have a fit of laughter about those “old” clothes!

Most importantly, the first two paragraphs of the story should now be fairly easy for the students to read. If these students feel they can’t deal with the beginning of the story, then all is lost…

Here is the exercise:

Mama Bank Pre Reading

 

This little video which I refer to as “Giving the Gift of Time” may be about saving time, but it certainly didn’t work out that way for me!

As some of you may recall, I was taking an in-service course at the end of the previous school year. For the course I prepared what I thought would be a pre-reading task for the story I am going to teach “Thank You Ma’m” by Langston Hughes. I used the tool we were learning about for adding questions to videos called Zaption, instead of my beloved Edpuzzle.

However, instead of enjoying having this particular task on my to-do list marked as done, I’ve sat and made a new version. For two reasons:

a – I wanted the task to lead to a discussion about uncovering motives and what that really means. That is the most important higher order thinking skill to teach in relation to this story. I didn’t think the previous exercise was what I wanted.

b – I was very unhappy with Zaption and the way it embedded online. Unless you viewed it in full screen you could miss the questions. When working in full screen it often exited that format on its own initiative.

In short, here’s the video. The worksheet is below. I learned about this video from the site Film English.

Dial Direct “The Notebook” directed by Greg Gray from Velocity on Vimeo.

Worksheet: Gift of time pre reading Mam

The definition of the term “soft skills” that I read on the site Dicitionary.com,  includes the following words:

“…they include common sense”…

Many of my deaf and hard of hearing teenage students have great difficulty in answering advanced type reading comprehension questions. Particularly those questions which call for taking advantage of common sense and general knowledge.

While I am under no illusion that one worksheet for each type of question (which you will find at the bottom of this post) will be enough review-practice for these students, it’s a place to start. I tried to make them as memorable as I could without resorting to things one wouldn’t show in class…

These three particular question types  have been chosen because they appear in the reading comprehension text of their first exam of the year. I’m hoping that this fact will encourage the students to pay attention when I highlight these question types in class and that they answer them well on the exam. Before we can talk about the sentence structure of the students’ answers they have to really understand what type of answer is required.

It’s one of the big challenges every year.

I’m hoping…

The question types are:

1) What is the answer to the question in the title?

2) Copy a fact that explains the title.

3) What is xxx an example of?

Here are the three worksheets:

Animals and Communication 2

Seeing isn’t believing 2

An example of 2015

 

Sometimes I encounter a post that echoes exactly what I am thinking about. It echoes, but gives my thoughts a clearer form.

This time it was Josette LeBlanc’s brilliant post: “Play Big: The #SMILEgoal Challenge” . She cleverly created an acronym for the word SMILE that embodies a really practical approach to change.

What Josette also did, for me, was to give me a simple explanation for why I have this need to spend part of each summer vacation working on changes for the upcoming school year. It is true that every single school year that ends leaves me with thoughts of things that could be done better, easier or in a more exciting way. But that’s not the only explanation for spending time changing things.

I need to gather energies to start a new year in a challenging teaching situation. And I need to start the new year with a big smile and a feeling of excitement, despite knowing many of the difficulties awaiting, and the awareness that every single year previously unknown difficulties  (of various kinds) magically appear.

So, I should define my changes for this year using the SMILE approach, and the change will give me the SMILE I need!

So here’s one of my most dramatic planned changes, presented according to the acronym.

Background: I determined that what upset me most during the past school year was that all my hard work making interesting, varied, colorful, interactive and practical review & homework material for my students was going down the drain (after 3 years of success) because a large number of students stopped using computers at home completely. Entire families rely only on cell phones. It’s a long story but the myriad of tech problems and emotional reactions that arose was overwhelming and dispiriting. These exercises will now become classwork.

Simplify – Focus on vocabulary.

I decided to focus on the amazingly clever flashcard site /app Quizlet. Since deaf and hard of hearing students have a major problem retaining vocabulary when learning a foreign language (in a nutshell, there is no, or little incidental learning from exposure to the language outside the classroom, because they don’t hear it spoken) I am in the process of creating a classroom for every group of students, with words and collocations that appear in the material we will be studying. Quizlet has ready-made games and study modes, I don’t have to prepare them. I just add the study sets I want.

Measure – Quizlet gives data about the students. Not only who is working and who isn’t, but which items are causing difficulties!

Integrate – The students will see these collocations and words in their material in class & on tests. They will see the relevance clearly. It doesn’t take a lot of time for me to add a set so I can fit this into my teaching schedule (less time than what I was doing before!).

Lean in and let it go – I’ll have to adapt using Quizlet as I go, I can’t relate to this one yet!

Enjoy – I’m already pleased about trying this different approach. We’ll have to see what happens next, but it gives off positive vibes!

So what’s your #SMILEgoal Challenge for the new school year?