Teachers must be able to engage all students in the content through a variety of activities, resources, and experiences. Lessons should be relevant, applicable, and engaging for all learners. Teachers must provide students with information and lessons that they can build upon creatively. Teachers should further make connections to real-world situations in the implementation of the lessons. We should value student-driven questions and work hard to provide students with multiple explanations that are applicable to each learner.
My Epic Work
The 9th graders that I am working with during my student teaching term are currently reading The Odyssey. The students must keep up with the reading and complete reading questions weekly. They also have vocabulary sets that go along with each book of The Odyssey. Along with this, students are asked to complete weekly My Epic Work Projects. These are creative prompts that engage the students in deeper, real life thinking surrounding topics found in The Odyssey. One example of the Epic Work is the My Homeland Project. Students are asked to design a map of their homeland after reading book 13: “Home at Last.” Students must turn in a detailed map, map key, and description of their homeland. They have the option to create a fictional homeland or use their real homeland.
Quill Interactive Lesson with Adverbs
Before a test on adverbs, we did a review using an online Quill interactive lesson. This was a successful lesson that really engaged the students in writing with adverbs. Quill sets all of the prompts for the teacher, but I edited some of the prompts to increase learner engagement. This is a feature with the Quill platform that I really appreciate because it allows me to personalize the writing prompts based off of student interest. This lesson proved to be an excellent review for our test on adverbs! Below I have inserted an example of a student’s written response to the final prompt: You are a knight who is tasked with saving someone who is locked away in a tower. Write a four-sentence paragraph using four different adverbs using this prompt.
My Fable Activity
During my internship working with 7th graders, I used fables to introduce the concept of a moral in a story. We spent a few days reading through different Aesop’s fables. The students were given a chart where they could track the topic of the fable, the moral of the fable, and provide a detailed explanation for how they got the moral. I asked the students to use textual evidence to explain their moral. After reading several different fables and talking about the topic, moral, and textual evidence, the students were asked to create their own fable in the My Fable activity. This activity gave students the opportunity to showcase their knowledge and understanding of fables and morals in a way that is creative and personal to their own morals and beliefs.