Week 14

Week of November 30, 2009
In English 12 and 10, I started studying Christmas traditions with the students. I felt that they needed to open their eyes to other cultures. I started the week of with presentations. Then, I had the students practice their presentation skills by holding class discussions on the holiday season. The students really got into these activities. Then, I had the students to begin researching specific countries and their traditions. They started preparing speeches and posters to present to the class.

In Honors, we finished reading Acts IV and V. The distractions were finally over, and the students were able to get into the text. The students finally showed a great appreciation for Julius Caesar and William Shakespeare. It made me happy that they got into the plot, themes, characters, and so on. During this week, I had my favorite lesson of the semester. We did a Facebook lesson dealing with the many characters of Julius Caesar. Each student was assigned their own character at the beginning of Julius Caesar, and they created a Facebook for that character. This lesson really helped the class see the relations between characters. Another teacher heard about how well my lesson went from the students, and she came to ask me if she could use it in her class with Greek Mythology. (I was very humbled.)

In Creative Writing, I started something new. I wanted everyone to practice collaboration in writing instead of independant writing. The students were really energetic about this type of writing.