On a snowy, windy night last week, Dr. Sondra Perl, Lehman College and Gradate Center, CUNY, NY and five National Writing Project teachers from the Rural Sites Network joined us to describe their journeys as teachers of Holocaust studies.
blogs
Reading = Annotating, Dialectical Notes, Responding, Blogging
I recently introduced doing annotations as one of a four-part response to a text.
1) Annotations - asking students to write down, draw… in any language… anything that comes into their heads as they are reading
2) Dialectical Notes - I asked students to re-read the text, and as they were reading, to find 6 to 8 chunks of text that they thought were important to the text. With these they did “quotations” and “responses” — which I described as extended freewriting beginning with and annotation.
Introducing Campaign Issues
Online Videos by Veoh.com This was our first lesson in a unit about the U.S. Elections. We will be Writing Letters to the Next President using Google Docs.
Where hurricanes form
The other day in Muster, I informed the entire school body that, "hurricanes are formed over Africa". Later in the day, one of our teachers with a great name approached me with several print outs bearing the information that hurricanes are formed over the coast off of Africa. I went onto Google and several pages into my search, I found what I was looking for, a video showing the formation of Hurricane Isabel over the mountains and deserts of East Africa.
Great pleasure in small things
I rode my bike to work today. It's 9 miles and it took me about 45 minutes each way. As I rode the back streets of Queens I passed by many interesting houses. One of my favorites is a small house on Astoria Blvd near Northern Blvd which resembles a castle. My course is mostly flat with very gentle hills. If I am lucky, and I was not today, the Queens Botanical Garden is open and I can ride through it and see the flowers.
Click to watch short video clips of Beijing's newest architectural wonders
On Monday, July 14, we will be sending a delegation of students and staff members to Guangdong Province in southern China for ten days of study and travel. What will they see? What will they experience? Watch their blog spaces here to learn more. (Hopefully, they will write to us.)
Summer ELA class should blog here
Hello students in the ELA class,
You have come to the right place. This is where you should be blogging. You may compose your work here. I am looking forward to reading your writing. Enjoy the weekend,
Mr. Sherman