Pictures from "Create Your Own Planet"

It's a little messier than I would like, but here they are. And by messy, I mean the layout of this blog post -- not my students work. I was incredibly impressed by what they did. I even created my own poster to display with theirs in class (my poster is the one titled, "Fryce").

Cheers.

"Create Your Own Planet" Assignment

Here is an assignment guide that I created for my lesson: "Create Your Own Planet".

For this project, students write an essay about a planet of their own creation - complete with life forms, physical characteristics, and details about the planet's discovery. Next, students create a poster or artistic representation of their planet that includes: the name of the planet, basic facts about the planet, and a description or picture of the life forms on the planet. I spaced this lesson out over two or three class periods: 1st was an Introduction Day, 2nd Poster/Writing Work Day, 3rd Presentation Day. Between the 2nd and 3rd class period was a weekend period - this allowed students plenty of time for completing their project.

Below is the lesson plan:
“Create Your Own Planet”
Instructions and Guide
Description:
This assignment consists of two main parts: first, an essay report on your planet; second, a poster displaying an image and basic information about your planet. Both the essay and the poster are worth 20 points. This assignment is due Tuesday, August 30, 2011.
Essay Instructions:
Your essay must meet the following requirements:
1. It must be one or two paragraphs long. Each paragraph must have at least three or four sentences.
2. Your essay must answer each of these questions:
a. What is the name of your planet? (Consider: describe how you developed the name or what the name means.)
b. Where is your planet located? (Consider: how far away from Earth is this planet? Is it in our solar system? Is it in a different solar system?
c. How was your planet discovered? (Consider: what is the name of the discoverer and how did he or she discover the planet – satellites, telescopes, or a manned spacecraft?)
d. What are your planet’s physical characteristics? (Consider: are the landforms similar to Earth? Are they different? Is there air to breath or another substance? Is there water?)
e. Does your planet support life?
i. If yes, describe the life forms. (Consider: are they similar to humans or completely different?)
ii. If no, describe why your planet does not support life.
Poster Instructions:
Your poster must meet the following requirements:
1. It must have a picture or a drawing of your planet. (This may be a hand drawn picture or something you create on your computer.)
2. Your poster must have each of the following:
a. The name of your planet.
b. The location of your planet.
c. The basic physical characteristics of your planet.
d. The name and a brief description (or picture) of the life forms that live on your planet.
Both your essay and your poster must also have the following:
1. Your full name
2. Your class
3. The due date of this assignment

Link between Teachers and students

Linking Student Data to Teachers a Complex Task, Experts Say

I got this article from Educationweek.org in a new effort to read more journal, newspaper, and scholarly articles on teaching. I hope to learn more about the issues and concerns of educators in the U.S. in preparation for a future return to the U.S. to teach. I feel this is something that my Northern Education teachers tried to impress upon me as a student, but I never fully grasped the importance of this type of study. Perhaps it was the fact that I was told or required to read only scholarly articles first and forgo articles of equal value, but with less complex jargon.

This article is about efforts to create better technologies to determine how to link teachers to students with the ultimate goal being to base some part of a teacher's overall performance on the performance of their students. I appreciate the effort by the parties involved with this project to try to develop a better way to accurately link students that actually attend class to a particular teacher (or for a teacher to select which students were actually taught by said teacher) but I still am against linking teacher pay to student performance. Especially if the final determiner is a student's performance on a standardized test. Data related to student's actual attendance does seem valuable --- what better way to demonstrate why a student is struggling if you can prove that the student is rarely present in your classroom.


Linking Student Data to Teachers a Complex Task, Experts Say

Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say | McClatchy

A pretty good article about small business success and failure.

Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say | McClatchy

A Cardinal Rule of Teaching

Today I almost broke one of my cardinal rules of teaching: never give homework or book work as a punishment for or a threat against misbehavior. My class wasn't really misbehaving, but they were getting on my nerves. I started class like usual with roll and then checked to see if they had done their homework. While I was checking homework I made a comment about "My wife..." and that started a flood of questions. I had no problem with this - it was the first time many had asked about me and I was willing to share. So I told them about how Salem and I ended up here and a little bit about where we're from. They loved it - especially when I told them why Michigan is the coolest state. (If you don't know, it's because you can show someone where you live or grew up in Michigan on your hands.) After our digression I wrangled them back to practicing TOEFL, but there were still one or two students who kept asking me questions. Like I said, I don't mind answering questions but sometimes I just don't want to talk about things with my students. Like, whether or not Salem and I want kids. They can ask, but I'm not going to talk about it with them. Well, no matter how many times I said no, one or two of them kept asking, "Teacher, do you want to have kids?" This was the point when I almost uttered the words: "If you don't stop asking me that I will assign you extra homework..." But I caught myself, took a deep breath, and continued teaching. It was frustrating, but demonstrates that I need to work on controlling how much I talk about and to nip-in-the-bud any potential problem questions a lot quicker. I know this is all a part of continuing to learn how to teach better, but it can be irratating to learn by doing.

On another note, I had a great lesson with 5th Secretarial! They presented and turned in their projects for "Create Your Own Planet" and man, was I ever surprised. I had three or four students create models of their planets, one student had a poster that had a Jupiter-like ring popping out of the page, and I had another student bring in a small tapestry with a Buddhist god on it from which she had drawn inspiration for the life forms on her planet. Needless to say, I was very pleased and I asked their permission to take pictures of their projects. Later I will share my lesson plan from this activity and some pictures from this activity.

An interesting week

This week has been very intersting. It was the "Finishing Week" for two of the graduating groups at Colegio Boston. This means that there were a large number of activities for these two groups to help prepare them for the next phase of their education. Neither of these groups are students of mine, but because the activities they are participating in are useful for my students I didn't have students for most of my classes this week. Monday I spent the day planning and reading (as well as attending a party thrown by my Secretary students for the graduating Secretarial students). Tuesday I had one class in the morning and then nothing for the rest of the day. Wednesday I had one class in the afternoon that went to a seminar on "proper make-up use" and my next class was almost entirely absent. On Thursday I spent the morning working at the hostel and then rode the bus to school for my one class at 2 o'clock; this class went ahead as usual. Today (Friday) has been the only normal day of my week.

So it has been an interesting week filled mostly with a lot of dead time doing planning and reading. I am looking forward to next week when things return to normal and I get to have my students back.

Teaching!

I am now a teacher!

I started working at the same school as my wife about two weeks ago! I am so excited to be teaching again - it is awesome.

I have four classes: one class of 24 seniors preparing for the TOEFL Test, two classes of secretary students (one of 7 students and the other with 15), and a Shelter or English Reinforcement class of 3 students.

So far what I've done with my students (except the Shelter students):

- "Me Poems": I used this assignment as an introductory activity for all my classes, each student wrote six simple statements about themselves in English. Student then shared these "Poems" with the class.

- Create a Movie Scene Activity: I split each class into small groups and gave each group a setting in which they were to create a "Movie Scene". Students had to create dialogue, describe their setting, and introduce their characters. Some of the Scenes were very dramatic and definitely a lot of fun.

- "Create Your Own Planet": This activity is in the process at the moment, but the goal is for each student to create a planet and describe it using an essay and a poster. The essay must be 1 or 2 paragraphs and use lots of descriptive words to describe the planet. The posters are what I'm most excited for - each student must draw their planet and any lifeforms living on their planet. This poster will be presented to the class next week Tuesday when the project is due.

Well, I've done a few other things with my students so far and I will write about those in the future. For the time being I'm super pysched to be teaching again! Yes!