Writing Hooks

I've started a short story unit with my grade 9 English classes and am starting with the first line of a story: the hook.
As a class we've gone to the library and browsed through many books finding first lines we like and dislike. We've discussed our lines with each other and come up personal definitions of what makes a good hook. We've looked at different types of hooks and have now tried our hand at writing our own.
Our hooks are based on this idea for a story: You've inherited a mysterious object from a relative you didn't even know you had. Each of us wrote 5 hooks and chose 1 that we thought was our best. I've compiled each class' best hooks into the following forms.
We would appreciate if you could take a few minutes and give us feedback on our writing.

Class 1


Class 2


Class 3

Tournament of Words: September

Today I held my first Tournament of Words in my three grade nine English classes. I wasn't sure exactly how it would go, since it is the first of my "out there" ideas that I'm using in my class.
In reading we always come across new words. The project is to take at least one of those words, whether encountered in English class, other classes or outside school, with its context and definition, and submit it for the tournament. Students get to vote on which words they like best and each month a winner is crowned. This way when one person learns a word the whole class gets an opportunity to learn it.

I introduced this at the start of the month as a year-long activity. Since it wasn't of immediate concern a fair bunch of students promptly forgot about it. I had two words submitted by the end of last week. This Monday, I reminded them of the upcoming tournament  (AND the expectations) and have had many more submissions as the week progressed. I made a few concessions this month, since students are still learning about how this project works: scouring the dictionary was accepted and I gave some time at the start of class today.

I used random.org/lists to  fill the brackets and better bracket maker to conduct each tournament.

First Period

Winner: Stadstimmertuinen - found in Anne Frank's Diary.
I'm pretty sure they voted for it just because they wanted to keep hearing me struggle to pronounce it.
I was happy to see pulchritudinous get so far.
For the final vote I had everyone close their eyes and vote for the winner and then did a mystery reveal.

Fourth Period

Winner: lapping - found in Killing Mr. Griffin.
This class is pretty small, so students find two words each during the month. I added the word of the day from both Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com to round out the tournament to 24 teams. It feels like a nicer number somehow.
One vote ended in a tie, so the contributors of Alzheimer's and xenophobia played rock-paper-scissors to determine which word advanced.

Fifth Period

Winner: wryly - found in Killing Mr. Griffin.
I thought it interested that both vehement and ardent were submitted, as the definition for each word contained the other!
There were definite favourite words in this class. All the quarter-final votes were landslides or shut outs.

Main Difficulty: None of my classes are powers of 2. For the first class I limited entries to the first 16 words submitted. In the following classes the list randomizer determined which words got byes.
I'm thinking of giving prizes to the people who contributed the winning words in hopes of getting students to submit extra entries. The more words they discover the more chances to win. After all the required entries are in, the remaining spots are first come first served until 32 words have been submitted.

Tournament of Words

I love words and learning new ones (The last new word I came across was spall.) and have been thinking of how I can bring this enthusiasm into my classroom. One of my ideas is the "Tournament of Words"

• Each time a student encounters a new word in their reading they can submit it, with a definition and the sentence they encountered it in, to the monthly word pool.
• At the end of every month I'd share all the entries with the class and set up a bracket.
• Students then vote on every match up and decide which word ends up as the new word of the month.
• At the end of the year all monthly winners compete for the title of new word of the year.

I'm hoping this gets students excited about encountering new words.

I thought of using polls, like a Google Form, for doing this, but at the school I'm at that would mean booking the laptop cart and a lot of work setting up each draw and then making new polls (in class) for every subsequent round. So, I've decided on using the old school method of hands-up voting, with a web-based bracket that can keep track of each round easily.

I did a bit of searching around and found betterbracketmaker.com. It makes filling in brackets very easy. You type in all the entries in the first round and the rest is just clicking. Like this:

The one down side of Better Bracket Maker is that it only does powers of two: from 8 to 128. If I had 23 new words one month I'd be out of luck. So, either my timing would change from being strictly monthly to as soon as 32 words are submitted or I would have to use another site. printyourbrackets.com has fillable PDF brackets from 3 to 64 entries and every number in between. I could do a 23 word draw with this site, but have to manually type each entry in each round. I don' think I mind that too much though.

Do you think students would be interested in this? How do you build enthusiasm for expanding vocabulary?

Literary Tweeters

I've always liked the idea of connecting the study of literature to social media to get students to try and relate to the characters they are reading about. I've had students make facebook profiles for characters are we read through Macbeth.

I came across these two sporcle quizzes the other day and really liked them.

Macbeth does Twitter

Wuthering Heights On Twitter

These two quizzes get you to try and figure out which character would have written the tweet. I enjoyed the use of hashtags in the quizzes and the fact that the tweets are original, not just a short quote directly from the book.

They could be used as a summary or review if you studied either work, or as an activation if you were going to get students to create twitter feeds & profiles for characters in a work you are going to study.

I may make my own, but am hesitant because sporcle now has an 11 game limit. Hmm, what I think I'll do is show my students these games and introduce the twitter assignment, plus tell them that the tweets most fitting for each character will be featured in the game I make for next year's class. (Maybe I'll find a quiz/game-making site that doesn't have a restrictions by then.)

What would a tweet from your favourite literary character be?

Digital Storytelling

Darren Kuropatwa { @dkuropatwa } and Andy McKiel {@amckiel } Technology Coordinators for my home division, St. James-Assiniboia, shared 6 easy pieces for digital storytelling at BU last week.

6 Easy Pieces v1 from Darren Kuropatwa

The great part of the PD was the hands on nature. We got to try everything presented, which makes using these resources in our classroom much easier. We learn by doing, so how can we teach without having done it?

1 - What did you contribute to the learning of others?
This is a great question to consider. I realize that once I am a teacher it will be my job to contribute to the learning of others, but I want to extend this everywhere and apply it now. I am making a conscious effort to help fellow students in any way I can and I intend to continue this with my colleagues, both locally and digitally.
Our activity for this piece was to pick three prompts from this google doc j.mp/bloggingprompt, pick a partner and select one question, and then record our conversation about it. We did this through the iTalk Recorder app for apple devices. We limited ourselves to 90 seconds and then emailed it directly play2learn.posterous.com. In less than five minutes we had posted a simple podcast!

REMEMBER: None of us are as smart as all of us!

Here's our conversation. I don't do a lot of sound stuff on this blog, but I want to do more. It's a great differentiation tool. I am very dissatisfied with the quality of my laptop microphone, so I guess I'm in the market for an upgrade.
My favourite story from this section was about using podcasting in a French classroom. Students were told they had a short time to think of a memory or feeling connected to thunderstorms and then they'd have to record themselves talking about it for a podcast. Having an authentic audience outside peers, family and their teacher motivated the students: they asked for extra time to look up vocabulary, to write out what they wanted to say, and even to practice it to make sure they were pronouncing everything correctly. The students were coming up with these requests themselves! So often we simply assign students to do these things, when they could be asking us to do them.


2 - What do you see in your world today?

Drop boxers, this is worth checking out!

We split up into the same groups and were given five minutes to capture 5 seconds of beauty on video. I enjoyed this a lot. I took a video of a public cup collecting pop tabs to help a young boy get a wheel chair. When we were done we used dropitto.me to send our videos to Darren's drop box.
 He then imported them into iMovie and quickly made a video of all our beauty clips. I do a lot of movie editing, but I'd never seen iMovie before not having a Mac. It looks pretty good.
When it came to music, we were given a great resource for finding creative commons music - jamendo.com. I love not having to worry about copyright violations and will definitely add jamendo to my list when I'm looking for music to use in videos and presentations.
This is the beauty we found:

Again I've been inspired and am collecting moments of beauty to make a video response.

3 - Who are you?
How do we explain ourselves, share ourselves? A life can be written down in volumes of volumes (Winston Churchill's biography anyone?), but our task was share ourselves in 4 slides attached to a minute of narration.
I chose to share how I decided to become a teacher. I drew my slides, but we were shown various ways to find creative commons licensed images for our slides, including search.creativecommons.org and www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. Appropriate crediting was also covered. Two ways that make attribution easy are the flickr cc attribution helper and open attribute.
I drew the pictures myself and put them into Powerpoint. I then exported the file as a pdf. To record the audio I used vocaroo.com. It was very easy. We then logged onto slideshare and uploaded our pdf and added our audio to it. We listened along in the editor and set the slide lengths to match our narration and, boom, an audio/visual story about me!

How i learned i wanted to teach from digitallearning

This will be a great way to learn about my students. It takes some of the nerves out of having to speak in front of their peers, but I still get to hear students talk about themselves.

We sort of ran out of time at this point, but these are the remaining pieces

4 - What did you learn today?
Students pair a picture and audio on the class blog to share what they are learning. Examples were students reading from picture books with a picture of them reading it.

5 - Scribe blogs - Blogs are used by students summarize their learning and write their own textbook!

6 - The learning culture is participatory
The internet is no longer just a giant bowl of jelly beans where we pick out our favourite flavours, but a jelly bean factory where we work together to make amazing flavours for everyone!

I loved this session. It flew by. I wish it could have been twice as long. Thanks, Andy and Darren!

Writing From Memory

I attended a PD last week about a daily writing exercise that focuses on writing from memory. It only takes 15 minutes and then can form the basis of future writing. Students are given a trigger word, say shoes. You give them about three minutes to jot down as many memories they associate with shoes as they can. Then you ask them to pick the memory that stands out most in their mind. They single out that memory. You ask the students just to think about the memory, while you ask leading questions. For shoes it could be, "Are they new or old?", "Are they your shoes?", "Are you wearing them?", "What colour are they?". This gets them to examine the memory in more detail. Take about two minutes to do this. Then say, "Go!" or "Write!" or some equivalent and the students are to write for ten straight minutes. Their memory needs to be in the present tense and start with, "I am...".
Students are told not to erase anything, just keep going. Also, that if they hit an impasse or a block to doodle on the side. Keeping the pen moving keeps your brain moving and taking the pen off the paper can easily take your mental train off its rails. Also, spelling doesn't matter. Just write down your experience. At the end of the ten minutes have students finish the sentence they are writing and put down their pencils.
These drafts are saved for a week or two, to allow for the writers to become detached, and then reviewed. The students pick a piece from that week that they like and then work on revising and polishing it into a final piece.
The rationale is:

• This gets students into the habit of writing, because it is hard work.
• They are generating a lot of text, which increases fluency.
• They are learning how to develop detail in writing.
• The motivation to write is authentic as the topic is something important to each individual.
• It instils confidence.

An inspiration for this method was Lynda Berry's book What It Is. It is a graphic novel that outlines writing from memory, and is itself an example of it. There are two questions we frequently ask ourselves when writing:

1. Is this good?
2. Does this suck?

Both undermine our writing and Lynda suggests every time students (or ourselves as writers) we ask ourselves one of those questions we answer ourselves with

A first draft is never meant to be perfect or better than someone else's writing. It is solely to get our ideas out of our head and onto the page. I think it is a great way to practice writing and to get people who would classify themselves as non-writers interested in writing.

If you want to read more about it, or just want to check out an awesome graphic novel, click the book below and buy it!

picture from
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?st=art&art=a45a8141b837f5

Here's what I wrote (unedited) in the 8 minutes provided. The theme was shoes.

fakebook character study

I created this on Microsoft Publisher as a template for a character study of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Students picked a main character after completing an activation on the play. After reading each Act students would update this profile. I called it fakebook, but it's pretty obvious what this is based on. Creating a profile requires students to have a strong grasp of the character and her/his various relationships.
I used it for Macbeth, but I feel it would be useful for any character study.