Daily Fun with Your Board (and a way to get your students to look at it)

My side board:

What you can't see to the right is our agenda for the week - what I want them to pay attention to.  But we all know that students often seem to refuse to look at the board. So I found a way to get them to look.  The first way is with the holiday of the day.  

I have a whole calendar of author birthdays, character birthdays, English class related holidays, and then just random ones when I have no class-related holiday.  They like to comment on those.  If you want access to it, I believe this link will let you view it: 

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=dmhidG42M2RpMzU4YmRrMWVhcm1mcW5oc2NAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ



Puns are a great way to get groans, of course, but also to get attention. Every morning, I write a new pun of the day on the board. OK, I do this mostly every day. When I forget to change it, I hear it from my students. I have my list of puns printed out and I just mark them off as I go. Some years, I'll assign a student to pick the pun and write it on the board for me. If you want, you can use them with the link below, but first I'll bombard you with a few!

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Police have confirmed that the person who tragically fell from the 18th floor night club was not a bouncer.

Clones are people two.

A dog barks 900 times a day. This is a ruff estimate.

Fruit farmers eat what they can and can what they can't.

I'm taking steps to overcome my hiking addiction, but I'm not out of the woods yet.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/138WJ2uQJVJ7HO1yz-ENInyvkixqTRXvO/edit




You'll notice the Smartest Student list.  I did this on a whim a while back with no expectation of keeping it going, but it worked so well with my ninth graders that I started using it with my upper levels too.  What do you need to do to be deemed the smartest student?  Say something smart in class.  Do something smart in class.  Win a Blooket.  Wear a shirt of a team I pull for.  Anything.  I change it up often and I have had students take pictures of their name on the board to show their parents.  It's fun and I will have students do things and then argue why that should put them on the smartest student list.  That's a win in my book!

So, share your pun.  Share the holiday I don't have.  Share what works as board attention getters for you.  Or just say hi in the comments.  :)

Like these ideas?  You may also like these Cultural Literacy activities. 

Using "Ordeal by Cheque" to Teach Inference

I've got a new course to prep for (I haven't taught English III for over twenty years, so much of my original material doesn't work for what I want to do now), so I've had a bit less spare time to update here.  Forgive me reposting the below, but it is a great lesson and deserves to be back in the spotlight!

_________________________________________________________________

Getting students to read between the lines is a bear.  For lower level readers, it is something they have not done before, most likely, yet it is typically heavy on state reading comprehension tests.  For AP level students, it is often something they can do, but do not feel comfortable relying on it for their analysis.

"Ordeal by Cheque" by Wuther Crue is the perfect story for this.  If you have never read it before, do so now.  I'll wait.  You can see a copy here.

With struggling readers, I put this up on the projector or tape large printouts on the white board as well as give them a copy to look at on their own.  Then we start looking at each check and focusing on the small details.  I am always asking what they think is going on.  Any thought is entertained regardless of how outlandish it may be.  We also entertain other students pointing out reason why an idea contradicts something in our text.  When we finally finish, I let them know that all that thinking they were doing about what could be happening in the story is inferring.  From that point forward, the word 'inference' is no longer as scary as it is when they only see it on state test practice.

With AP Lit students, I put them into groups and I only give them one page at a time.  I have printed each check as big as I can and I have them taped to the white board.  Students are in groups of 3 or 4 and start trying to figure out what the "real" story is here.  I ask them to annotate the story on the board by marking down what ideas they feel are important, details they notice, and questions they have.  Some will look up the amounts of money and figure out how much it is in today's dollars.  They always get excited when the first check to Tony Spagoni is revealed.  Again, we focus on what is happening outside of the checks.  In the end the take away is that all of these thoughts that they have is where good writers like to lay their story.  The text is great, but what happens between paragraphs and off screen (so to speak) is just as rich.

I have noticed that when I use this with standard classes, they are fine to stick with their class-created interpretation.  The AP kids, however, have thought of so many ways to interpret the events that they want to know what the "real" story is.  When I let them know that this is all of the story they get, they are frustrated (but not in a negative way).  The first year I did this and saw how amusing it was that they felt that there was not enough closure, I asked them if they had ever read "The Lady or the Tiger".  I was shocked to find out that they had not, so for fun, a few days later I gave them the story to pick apart, but kept the final paragraph off of their copy and sealed in an enveloped pinned to the wall.  The board was labeled LADY and TIGER and they had to provide their evidence for which one they thought was behind the door.  They scoured the story and when we only had a few minutes left in class, I read the final paragraph to them.  Let's just say I was lucky the bell rang to release class!  :)

Tech Tuesday: Where Did Your Cursor Go?

 I ran into this problem recently when I was issued a new computer - my text cursor disappeared when I was using Google Docs.

Turns out, it is not a Google Docs error, btu rather a setting in Windows.  If you find that you are having trouble seeing your cursor against a white background or it is just nonexistent in the text area, but visible in other areas, then the solution is a fairly simple one.  No need to call your tech guy for this one.

This solution works on Windows based computers. 

First, click the windows button and the R key.  When this window pops up, type in:

main.cpl

Once you do that, click the POINTER OPTIONS TAB.  This screen will pop up:

Make sure HIDE POINTER WHILE TYPING is not clicked.

That will solve your problem.  If you are still finding that the cursor turns white and is hard to see, then you can solve that problem by following the above directions and clicking the POINTERS tab.  Click the TEXT SELECT and then BROWSE.  Scroll down and choose something like beam_im.  

And don't worry if you end up not liking your changes.  You can always hit the revert to default to reset everything.