Snow Days and School Days
January has brought many surprises this year, mainly the fact that we have had at least 5 calamity days due to snow and frigid temperatures. All of them in the last two weeks! As I write this today, however, it was 60°, and we had a fine time grilling some juicy steaks. But I digress. I have to admit, I cleaned a few drawers and scraped the inside glass of my oven (yuck!) to keep busy (and to avoid mopping, sweeping, and dusting AGAIN!). I even went in to school, changed all the decorations to February, and made new lesson plans. Who knows if I will be on track this week, as I discovered last week while teaching Science. We opened our books to, what I thought was the correct page (according to my plans), only to discover we were actually on the page from an entire week before! Yeesh!
We had been focusing on two writing assignments which we get ready for parents during Catholic Schools Week. Parents come to eat with their kiddos and look at all the cool stuff they’ve accomplished recently. So I really wanted some cool stuff hanging in the hall. Then I look much cooler, too! Believe me, I need all the help I can get!
So these pictures show two of my favorite projects – cinquain poems, and a short story about what would happen if students were caught in a snow globe. The students write the poems and type them in computer lab, while learning how to add borders to the material as well. The stories are a good exercise in storytelling, having a beginning, middle, and end, along with revision and editing practice. Students enjoy adding their photo into the snow globe drawing!
The projects turn out well, and students are excited to see them in the hall to show their parents and everyone else. I will attach a link to Teachers Pay Teachers for the paper I use for writing the cinquain poems step-by-step.
