BIBLIOGENESIS Choice, Publication, and Exploration in the Middle School Language Arts Classroom
Shakespeare, Remixed
When introducing students to Shakespeare, I like to first give them a chance to play around with his language and discover its possibilities for themselves. Here are the 8s rearranging the first lines of Twelfth Night : If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite [...]
Reading Buddies
All grades participate in Reading Buddies, but the 6s take to their task as mentors and teachers with a particular curiosity and zeal. Last week, as we began our own study of word study and word origins, they had the idea of augmenting their reading with mini-lessons and word studies on small white boards and [...]
An Odyssey, pt. 1
The seventh graders and I have just embarked on a reading of Stanley Lombardo’s wonderful translation of The Odyssey, and (unlike Odysseus) we are making remarkable progress in getting wrapped up in the music and drama of the story and exploring many of its major themes and motifs. Our procedure is that I read the [...]
A Student Plans a Lesson
When asked to teach the class a key concept from Scott McLoud’s Understanding Comics, a student put together this lesson plan. It’s impressive how many of the “moves” that teachers make she has internalized and used for her own purposes here: Lesson Plan 1. Ask class to look around, look at their surroundings. 2. What [...]
The Rite of the Rumble
Our last two focus writes in eighth grade have been responses to footage of two of the most explosive moments in sports and dance history: the eighth round of Ali/Foreman’s”Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974 Zaire and the first ten minutes of Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring,” which first debuted [...]
Sports & Poetry
My eighth grade poetry & fiction crew shared with the class these three lovely poems about swimming, baseball, horseback riding, and skiing.
Is Play Essential to Being Human?
Listen to eighth graders respond to a (very condensed) version of Johan Huizinga’s theory that play is essential to being human.
