A Peaceful Snowy Day

It's a great day for students to work on their in-class writing. Sixth graders are writing a story of realistic fiction, pretending they are stranded somewhere like the book for Miss Brown's class. Also in connection with their novel, eighth graders are writing a fantasy story. Seventh graders are working on description essays.

They did a great job focusing, as we watched the snow fall!

Fair Use Friday Collages

After spending time before break learning to cite sources, students revisited the topic of giving credit by discussing the concept of fair use -- which means that there are certain cases (like education, parodies, criticisms, commentaries, and news reports) where people are allowed to use copyrighted material without receiving permission, though they should still give credit. In case you have any questions, check out these parent tips sheets about copyright, fair use, and piracy.

Digital Piracy
Respecting Creative Work

Students took time today to practice transforming pictures into new purposes, like we do when we use written information. Their challenge was to find pictures from magazines/newspapers and rework them. There were some pretty great results!

Each class voted on the student who changed their pictures the most. This was a seventh-grade winner.

 

We had lots of men and women and animals with different heads and bodies today! Lots of funny switches. :)

I had lots of students use only the colors/shapes of certain pictures to completely change the content. 

Some students chose to create new scenes from the pictures they found.

 

Many of the students made some great products!

Polishing Your Writing

Students, while we're working on our blogs today, we are going to work with parallel structure. See the great infographic below from this website. This goes great with what we reviewed yesterday about commas.

Browse more Education infographics.

Source

Reading Tallies Quarter 2

The Pages Party is progressing! Students totaled their reading logs this week. The class averages range from almost 3,000 pages per student for this school year to 1,500. Way to go! :)

"If I Were in Charge of the World"

Happy 2013! Your students all wrote and shared about how they would change the world if they were in charge. Many of them chose to cancel school. :) Below are several pictures of 8th graders sharing their ideas with the class.

Saint Presentations

Thanks to Mrs. Engen who donated saint medals to our students. My homeroom students enjoyed choosing one to have. They created posters and shared what they learned about four different saints. Ask your student to see what they learned!

St. Maximilian Kolbe



Our Lady of Medjugorje

St. Blaise

St. Germaine

Citing Books

While we were covering plagiarism, we practiced giving credit to other sources through a Works Cited page. We practiced in groups and cited six different books that we had in class. The format and these examples can be found at Purdue University's Online Writing Lab:

Basic Format – If there is no author, start with title

Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.

Book with One Author

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print.

Book with More Than One Author

Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. Boston: Allyn, 2000. Print.



Seventh graders practice citing a book using MLA format.

 



Students also learned that apps or websites like EasyBib.com, which help students format Works Cited pages (but not always correctly, which is why they must know the format!)

 

Vocab Wall Winners

Congrats to my 2nd hour class of 6th graders who found the most vocabulary words in their reading and in context in the world! They found almost 50 words for our word wall. We celebrated with brownies before break!

Students bring in notecards to fill up the word wall. 

6th graders have some fun while eating their brownies before break!