Week 13

Week of November 16, 2009
An important lesson I learned this week was appealing to student interest in lesson planning. It makes the students want to learn! Throughout my semester at Clay-Battelle, most of my students have been talking about how excited they are for the movie release of The Twilight Saga: New Moon on November 20, 2009, based on Stephanie Meyer's New Moon. Therefore, I wanted to design my lessons to appeal to student interests in this novel/movie. I started the week off by introducing literary trends that have occurred throughout history. Through my PowerPoint presentation, I described the trends in a visual manner. Then, I introduced the most popular trend at this point in time--Vampires. I described the time line of vampire trends throughout history from the 1600s to present day. I included all literary pieces written. The students were amazed with the history included within vampire folklore.

After large discussions of vampires, I showed the video, Vampire Secrets, from the History Channel. The video showed the history of vampires and how they were included in literature. It over viewed all the popular accounts of vampires in literature, movies, and television shows. All of the students were on task throughout the entire unit. They came into class eager to learn about vampire literature. Through this, I learned that if you pick lessons that appeal to students, they will be more eager to learn.

In creative writing, the big Multi-Genre Projects that we've been working on all semester were due Friday, November 20th. The students worked diligently all week on compiling their portfolios. I was proud of how hard my creative writing students worked to complete the assignment. Some students even told me how excited they were to compile their work for the semester in a portfolio because it showed how much they've done and how hard they've worked.

Thanksgiving Break is all of next week. I can't wait to see New Moon and to grade the Multi-Genre Projects!