How did April show up this fast?
I cannot believe that it is the 4th quarter of our school year already. This year has gone past so quickly again. My classes have been busy and have created and communicated like bosses this year again. I am consistently impressed on the whole with what these young people are capable of when given the tools and allowed to show just what they can do.
I helped to coach debate this past year and was awed at the speed the 8th grade students and, for that matter, the high school students took on new debate resolutions and formulated their statements, both pro and con. I was also amazed at the composure they showed while involved in the heat of the debates themselves. What wonderful skills they picked up while engaged in these activities! Powerful and “real-world.”
I had my 8th grade Language Arts students join the NaNoWriMo YWP novel writing project again this year and had several students go through all of them go through all the steps to have their 10,000 plus word novels printed. What an accomplishment for them. I had approximately 80% of my students achieve their word count goals, all of them over 10,000 words. They are authors now!
My 7th grade Literature students did a great job with their reading challenges this year. I have several students who are already past 40 books for the school year. That is awesome. Many of them created some super cool major meaningful book projects to show they comprehended the novels and put some of them on their Kidblog sites.
We did some cool things in all of the classes I have. It has already been a great year. We have had many great guest speakers come to share in our 7th grade Futures class. Wow! So many careers and so many great people sharing what they do with our class out of their own thoughtfulness. Great stuff.
I took on directing the middle school drama this spring. That was a brand new challenge too. Holy cow! That was a ton of work and incredibly satisfying and enjoyable too. I was so proud of the 7th and 8th grade students who tried out for the play and performed it so well in March. It was a very nice set of shows! They even learned a bit of Shakespeare!
I am enjoying learning this year again! Cool job!
Hope I can do some of this again next year! 🙂
Boylens Blatherings 