Thing 5d

I don't always want to be slamming other people's ideas about getting students motivated, but a lot of what I see are time-wasters being promoted instead of actually getting the child to produce something. In the real world, the boss tells you to write a report/email/introduction of a new concept/product, etc., then you'd better sit right down and get to it! I think that a lot of students think of using technology as "fun," but then they're missing the point of proofreading for mistakes and all when Word will do some of that for them.

From Google Reader, I was looking at Lesson Plans to Promote Writing by Dawn Dodson. I liked the idea of writing a story featuring a younger child by interviewing and then creating a story around that child's life. Not everyone has a younger brother/sister and we can't really take a field trip to the elementary school, so I guess interviewers would have to get creative about meeting the child for the initial interview. Her next idea is collecting information about a classmate and making graphics and other nonsense for an oral presentation, actually avoiding much of writing. This is ok if you're doing some kind of journalism unit, though. She doesn't actually say it's for studying journalistic writing or for speeches, although she does emphasize giving a speech at the end.

The next lesson isn't one of hers and it appears to have more building opportunities to actually get the kids writing an essay. Basically, take a picture, talk to the students about writing a hook/lead to get the readers' attention, then share what they wrote. There is more discussion with the students reading an intro with the lead taken out and creating new leads. Then, this goes to developing their own introduction paragraphs. Seems like a good building activity to get them to understand the concept. Good practice and opportunities for discussion before they have to do it on their own.

The last one is about persuasive writing using climate changes and environmental concerns. This could be changed to political issues depending on the students, imo. Some students will obviously want to write about things they feel strongly about not related to the environment. The problem with this particular lesson plan is that the writer did not consider students preferences and instead lists a lot of background resources for the teacher to become familiar with climate issues and share with the class. Otherwise, good ideas, but maybe have the students do their own research and then write a response based on current events they actually care about.

Thing 5c

Free Technology for Teachers offered some ideas on Google Earth Flight Simulator. I've seen students using this before when I wanted them to check out city information or look at geography in the computer lab. What is neat is that you can be exact and check out a specific street or address. This makes the lesson come alive more than just talking about a typical French restaurant. They can actually see the restaurant and what it looks like in the neighborhood. The downside to the Google Earth site is that it's not updated very frequently. The pictures of my house are over a year old. So, this could be used in current events for the "before" pictures of disaster areas, for example.

Thing 5b

Writing Lesson Plans... That Don't Rush the Writing by Debra Karr

Ok, this may not be a new idea, but I liked the different criteria she has listed here. I know my students don't always take group activities seriously, so the more structure (checklists) they have, the better. The more presenting/discussing, the better. I liked the enforced time limit idea. I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to take the time to make sure their friend's work doesn't have silly mistakes, but most of the time I see they're not really motivated. This makes me wonder about the people they call "friends." :) "Sure, man, I can look at your paper... for a whole 10 seconds... " When I taught English in Gwinnett, we had copies of Anchor papers. I'm not sure if Barrow uses these (or even calls them by the same name), but they're example papers that have comments and a score level (A, B, C, F) on them. I could see adapting that idea to French and working with Debra Karr's ideas in the hope that this next group of students will do better. Usually I don't ask my kids to do more than proofread, but I liked how they need to justify why they think this one is a good work sample, etc.

Thing 5a

I didn't have anything specific I wanted to research at the moment, but I always like checking out generic lesson plans. I started by looking for foreign language and geography plans, but didn't see anything too interesting. Some of the blogs that pulled up showed they didn't have many weekly updates so that seemed to me that they would be rather static.

Since I wanted to incorporate more art into French 2, I thought I would try "Les Impressionists." What pulled up wasn't even remotely related to the artists or the art movement; however, I did end up finding what I was looking for in the first place! This has links to generic lesson plans for cross-curricular ideas. When I started clicking on some links, I found this gem on African languages.

This lesson plan is about looking at African languages and the problems associated with having lots of local dialects. This would give students time to explore why this is a problem and why having a common language (French for example) would make life easier for people. While it's a good thing to preserve customs, history, and languages that make people unique, there is still an absolute need to be able to work with a common language.

The problem is that Reader came up with a website, not an actual blog, so I don't know how often this site would be updated. Anyway, the site is www.lessonplanet.com So, I learned a bit more about Reader: it doesn't necessarily look for a specific TYPE of article such as a blog. It pulls up all kinds of related or semi-related articles/blogs/websites/online newspapers, etc.