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Narrative Writing - Travel Blogs

11/24/2013

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My teaching partner and I just finished a Narrative Writing unit.  From our district Literacy Coaches we were tasked with having students write narratives in an urban setting.  The performance task the coaches wrote had students researching Philadelphia, New York or Chicago and then writing a story set in an urban setting of their choice.

Our tech take on this idea was to have students research a city (San Francisco or New York City) as if they were planning a trip there. (You can see the websites we built on the Students tab of this blog.)  They had to interesting places to see, restaurants, transportation, hotels etc and create a budget.  Once they finished researching we had them create a blog,  one each day, for the seven days of the trip.  At the end of the "trip" we added a fantasy aspect of the trip on day 7 when the zombie apocalypse happened and they had to survive.  

You can read the blogs here.  If you do, feel free to make comments to the students.  Just like everyone, they like getting feedback on their work.

I am currently grading the blogs, and so far I have been very happy with the writing I have seen.  It is far and away better than any personal narrative assignment I have had to assign and read.  I think by giving students setting, characters (the friends who went with them), and problems (Every day we spun the wheel of problems which was just a random name generator that I had filled with issues like theft, illness and random people) students were free to write an interesting story without having to invent everything or regurgitate the same personal narrative they have written since 4th grade.

This all leads to what might be an exciting addition to this assignment.  Google has added a feature to Google Earth which allows people to map and then tell their stories.  Here is the link for that video.  I have not tried it yet, but I can see it being a great addition to this assignment.
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Bucket List for Middle School

11/13/2013

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Today for advisory I showed a great video from one of my favorite blogs, Teach Thought.  It was a video about a 4 year old from Africa and what he had on his bucket list.  The video goes on to discuss how 1 in 5 children die in Africa because of a lack of clean water and would be a great discussion or charity to have students work on.  

I used the video as a starting point for creating their own Bucket List, brainstorming what they want to do before they die.  I found this great list of sentence starters online as well.
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Poster making

7/29/2013

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When I was younger I used to keep a journal where I would write down quotes that I thought were meaningful. Today I found a site that allows you to type in a quote and choose a template to make

a poster out of it. This is great for people like me who can find the interesting quote but don't have the artistic talent to give it the umph it deserves to make it classroom wall worthy. http://recitethis.com

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19 ideas from ISTE's ignite session

8/2/2012

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