Today was one of those days when an activity was going to well that as a teacher all I wanted to do was to give the students enough time to really immerse themselves in it. In our case, that activity was melodrama.
The culminating activity for the theater class, as I noted last week, is writing and staging a melodrama. Mr. Pratt gave the students the outline for the play today, and gave them a standard blocking for it. He helped put them into groups, and the groups improvised lines and worked on characters. Once we returned to the classroom, we briefly wrote reflections about this, and then the students returned to their groups and began writing their scripts. They were still working hard when the recess bell rang.
After recess, we went to the Tech Center. Ms. Richards and I collaborated on this lesson. She is having the students work on a PowerPoint slide show about "American Spirit" and I figured that our field trip to the San Fernando Mission surely pointed to an important time in California, and therefore American, history. So the students learned how to download pictures from the Internet (in this case my Picassa/Google photo albums), and they incorporated one of those pictures into their slide and added some text about how this particular picture said something about America and the American Experience.
After lunch, we had more time to work on the play script, and a couple of the groups even started practicing it. You can see some scenes from this practice session in the slide show above. We went to PE where we just did some routine rotations through activities. We corrected Tuesday's homework when we returned to the class. And then the day was over! I did not do all the things I planned to do, but I had no regrets giving the extra time to play writing because the students were so motivated and the work they were doing was so hard!
Homework: (1) Write a good sentence for each spelling word. (2) Do "Multiply by 4 Digits," Math, pages 197-199, even numbers only. Be sure to show all work again. (3) Do "Write an Equation," Math, page 201, all problems.
1 comment:
Mr. Bassett, I liked your comment: "I did not do all the things I planned to do, but I had no regrets giving the extra time ..." With today's unrelenting emphasis on test scores, I think teachers must feel somewhat chained to the curriculum. It's good to see that there are moments of freedom.
Reminds me of Dylan Thomas' poem in which he evokes his happy childhood and laments its end, but readily concludes: "... I sang in my chains like the sea." That sounds dreadful, but it really isn't.
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