Short Stories from a Middle School Teacher: Gold Stars

Gold Stars

One of my favorite things to do my third year of teaching was team teach. The Civics and Economic teacher and I would put our classes together regularly so we could create cross curricular stations and activities for the kids. The arrangement worked out great because, even though there were more kids in the room, the kids were less willing to act up with two authority figures in the room.

One day the Civics teacher’s side of the room was going downhill and fast, while my side of the room was behaving like angels. Finally, he called out, “Whoever is being good will get a gold star!” (Amazingly 8th graders coveted these stars like none other).

The room got completely silent and without missing a beat one of the students on my side of the room said, “You mean like Hitler did to the Jewish people?”

I suppressed my laughter and thought to myself, “Yes, finally they are retaining true things about WWII!”

Then I thought to myself, “Too bad I don’t teach history.”

Comments

1,000 Pens update

My 1,000 pens came in the mail! I thought I would show you guys what they look like! Want your own cheap box of 1,000 pens? Click Here To read that blog post On a side note I found an awesome recipe that I made tonight with Basil from my garden. I liked it so much I thought I would share it with you! Tomato, Mozzarella, Quinoa, and Basil Salad

Say what? Inference Oops

So I got my first cold of the teaching season. It is too early in the year to call in sick because I am trying to keep my routines and authority in place. I have been barreling through with this cold all week. We started learning about inference this week. For the most part it has been going well. We read "Made out of Meat" and then made inferences about the story. The story is a conversation between two beings and their discussion about these beings they have just encountered who are, "Made out of meat." The reader needs to infer that the being having a conversation are aliens and the beings made out of "meat" are humans. An adaptation of the story if you are interested: At the end of the story the aliens decide that they are going to, "Pretend like no one is home," and leave without making contact. One of the inference questions I asked my students was, "Why were the aliens going to pretend like no one is home?" One block of my s...

Teaching Point of View with Video Games

I was looking for new ways to introduce point of view and I stumbled across a GREAT idea! Using video games! There are tons of video games in different points of view. Halo=First person point of view Mario 64= Second person point of view Tomb Raider=Third person limited point of view The Sims=Third person omniscient point of view A great video overview that I found:

Escape Room The Game

Search This Blog