Class Notes - What do you do when 1 student is being bullied?

photo courtesy of mangee

Today in class I had a really difficult time controlling my students. I am not very good with "class management" and I do apply techniques that I learned at Fred Jones "Tools for Teaching Workshop" but some times they do not seem to work for me. I'm sure I am applying them wrong because, normally, they do work...

However, today, well, this week has been pretty difficult for our entire community and maybe I am being a little too lenient because of the tragic event that occurred last Friday...

This doesn't excuse the amount of bullying I witness in class against 1 of my students. It isn't that they are overly physically mean but there are taunts and obvious disrespect. I am not really sure what to do any more. I talk to the students individually. I feel like I catch it when it is happening and they just continue. I know, I need a consequence but I am not sure if I can give detentions for that or if that will backfire and they will end up harassing this kid outside the classroom...

What would you do? Or what do you do? It makes me sad and frustrated and pissed off. I get really angry at them because it just seems so mean to me.

If you have any suggestions, please post them. I am feeling at a loss right now...

Dealing with a Tough Situation

I know, normally, I have a post for Graphic Novel Fridays, but today, there is a lot going on where I work. I cannot go into details but our entire school community is dealing with some thing very difficult right now.

I hope everyone is has a wonderful weekend.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. - Kahlil Gibran

I'm here..but I'm not...

I have to close the library today so I came in early for my morning workout. Now I'm hiding in the conference room. It's kind of nice have 2 hours to just take my time and mozy into my day.

This new year has started off with my taking on another LT7 class so now I have 2 classes to teach instead of just one. I am not sure how many school librarians teach a year long class anymore but we do it here at the private school I work at. I think, more school should have their librarians really teach a class. Our course is a year long but even if kids get a class for a semester to help them learn research and technology skills they will be better for it. We teach those life long practical learning skills that most administrators and teachers think kids already have but they done. Or these are the skills that departments are supposed to teach but don't have time to teach because of all the requirements and standards and other things they need to teach kids.

I love this class. I love teaching it. I love that I have to revisit things and that I am always learning. I learn from my own research, I learn from the kids, I learn from my colleagues. It's amazing.

I did meet my new students for the first time 2 days ago and they are really great. I normally teach 6th period (after lunch) and 8th period (near the end of the school day) so the kids are either rowdy from lunch or getting rowdy because its the end of the school day. I don't mind, I have to just accept that I am kind of the same way. But, hopefully, I give these new students the skills they will need to be successful during their time at our school. I really wish that all school had an appreciation and devotion to their libraries. Most don't even have them...

Class Notes: The Library Catalog

Yesterday, I taught our book catalog lesson. Do you know how you teach something over and over again and you just get bored or no matter what approach you use to searching, you still encounter some inexplicable problem? Yes? Well, that is where I am with this lesson.

At this point, I feel that the worksheet I use cannot really be improved upon but again, I teach do teach this lesson a lot and I am probably not seeing a different approach...We discuss search strategies, techniques, explain different navigational features and then practice some searches to show the kids what we want them to do.

The kids were pretty successful and all found books on their topic and seemed to understand how to use the catalog. And that..is the main objective of the lesson is that they use the catalog to find a book.

(ok, an aside, I really am going deaf. My coworker was trying to ask me a question about today's lesson and I could not hear her over the din of the boys playing boardgames behind us. sad.)

Class Notes: Introducing the Internet

Image from Fernando Arconada's Flickr Stream. Also, I love behold.cc. It makes it so much easier to find images online that you can use without worrying about copyright. Thanks Creative Commons licenses and the people who apply them to their work!

Ok, enough about that...

Today's class was on the internet, internet history and a brief lesson on breaking down URLs and what they tell you about the webpages and even organization.

This lesson is probably the best lesson out of our section on the Internet. We try to cram a lot of information into a 5 day unit that also includes media literacy. This lesson is chock full of vocabulary like ISP, web site, webpage, URL, ARPANET, internet, etc. This time I had the kids practice their typing skills, or keyboarding skills, at the end of the lesson which worked a lot better than when I have it was the beginning. I did not feel so rushed and the kids had time to complete their worksheets before the end of class. Also, I am not becoming notorious for keeping the kids after the imaginary bell rings. We don't have bells on campus so kids and teachers just need to watch the clock. Usually, at the end of class, I'm writing a bunch of "please excuse their tardy" notes to my students' teachers.

This lesson, I also used one of the Brain Pop videos to reinforce what I had just talked about. Brain Pop looks like it might be too young for our middle schoolers but honestly, they love it and the quizzes and activities at the end of each video works pretty well at reinforcing the lectures. If your school does not have it, you might share it with them. One of our science teachers introduced it to us and the Science department as well as my class utilizes it. There are some things that I cannot explain very well and Brain Pop does a pretty good and fun job in presenting that information.

Pluses for today include - not being behind in our lessons, giving kids enough time to work and ask questions, a time to reflect and reinforce the lesson through a fairly engaging tool and also, getting the kids out on time!

Class Notes: approach to our notetaking lesson

I decided that I should probably start keeping entries on the lessons I have been teaching the last 3 years so that I can see what I can update and improve upon. Sometimes teaching the same lesson over and over again gets pretty stale and of course, it shows. (sorry children!) And sometimes I will attempt to switch it up a bit to make it more enjoyable for me..and hopefully, the kids.

Today was the notetaking lesson where we teach children how to properly take notes. Yes, kids still need help with how to properly take notes. I know, I was never taught how to take them and not until college did I really get a grasp of what the importance of proper notetaking (organizing, evaluation, putting things in my own words, etc.) Normally, I go through our slideshow and make the kids practice with my own generic topic and encyclopedia article. This usually takes about 15-20 minutes which leaves about 15 minutes for the kids to work on their own project. I tend to want to give them as much time working in class so I can walk around and help them and see how they are doing then lecture them for too long.

This time, I did use my generic article but I also had the follow along with their own articles. I thought it was a better approach. One of the first things we talk about is skimming and scanning to get a overall picture of what the article is about and to find keywords or phrases. I used our lovely document camera, which is one of the best tools ever and should be in every classroom, to show the kids my article. I demonstrated how reading the 1st and last sentence of a paragraph gives you an idea of what's in the body of the paragraph and then had them do it with their first article. I also had them take out their brainstorming worksheets to see the kinds of questions they came up with at the very beginning of the process. This was great because it gave them a little guidance as they worked and also tied in the lesson from a week and a half ago to what we were working on in class today. As we worked, we also formatted and discussed why notecards and these formatted cards were important.

After that step, I had them write 1 fact per card and discussed how these were their notes so whatever symbols or abbreviations they came up with, as long as they understood them, wasa good approach. Another difference in how we taught these lessons is that we had them create bibliography cards before their first sets of content cards. This was a better way to showing them how the 2 different types of note cards are connected.

A great question from one of my students (remember, I teach 7th graders for the most part) is why they need to write an author and page number on the card. I explained that 1 reason is when he's evaluating his cards and he reads something and it does not make sense, he knows exactly which book he used and which page to turn to. A light clicked (i think. i hope!)

Overall this was a pretty great lessons. I do have some glitches to work out, mainly with timing and I also need to update the slideshow I use because I was missing some information. I updated it and then ended up not saving. I know! that's the biggest mistake ever and I stress that with the kids but hey, I'm human!