I have my 6th and 7th grade girls convinced that if they whine, I will get a nervous twitch. This is not technically a lie, since I do think it could kill me if I have to listen to as much whining as they are capable of … of which they are capable … that they are…
School starts back up on Monday. How does a caped teacher go back to the grind after two lovely weeks off? What’s that quote about faking it until you make it? While many of us miss our little pumpkin-heads, and worry about them, and think of great things for them to learn, we still cherish…
For Spirit Day yesterday, I used a project inspired by the book Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold. In this story a girl imagines she is flying above the night skies of New York and claiming it for herself. She reclaims the union building that won’t let her father join due to the color of his…
Earlier this year our little program was in the depths of student misbehavior. A couple of strong role models were pretty much running the place with chronic defiance and bullying. We had tried everything we could think of to change the tide and were at a loss. By this point students had lost nearly every…
As an attention-getting device the yodeling emergency button is barely passable. The yodel is quiet, and the students either giggle or yodel loudly when it is played. As a community-building device, however, it has come in handy. I put it up one day, and no one noticed until I began to run around asking if…
Warning–This conversation would be rated PG-13. It would be, if folks rated this kind of thing. E. is a very bright, very oppositional 7th grader. He is truly quite funny and entertaining, but he gets the class so riled up, he has to be tempered a bit. One of his skills is to weasel out…
I’ve read, reviewed, and discussed a wide variety of books and curricula on community building, the teaching of pro-social skills in at-risk teens, developing a classroom management system through the development of a community. What I’ve learned though, can be summarized by this photo. When I was putting together my classroom on the first days…
This week, we reviewed sentence fragments. In an attempt to energize a possibly dull topic (especially considering this has taken quite a bit more review than you might imagine), I first had them writing sentence fragments on their individual white boards. They were supposed to make the fragment interesting enough to entice their partner to…
Wear The Cape 