Snowflakes for Sandy Hook

In the wake of the recent threats against our schools and the worrying our students have been doing over these past few days, I decided that the best way to combat this was by participating in the Sandy Hook Winter Wonderland Project. My students worked together to create a beautiful collection of snowflakes to send to Sandy Hook Elementary school, and were able to ease some of their worrying in the process. Here are some pictures of our progress! When we get back from break, I intend to use this as an opportunity to discuss digital citizenship and appropriate behavior online.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Attaching Standards to CPS Questions to Track Grammar Progress

During our professional development today, Tony Bollino showed us how to make our own standards in CPS to track our students progress on our own terms. I immediately thought of our weekly grammar practice, since it is hard to really gauge how much of the grammar the students are grasping. Specifically, it's obvious that some aspects of grammar are more difficult than others.


    I created a quiz question with the entire sentence of the week (in this case, "the evil doctor does experiments on his patients he doesn't want anyone to find out"). Each question referred to one word in the sentence, which the students had to identify. By attaching a standard to each question, I can track the students' progress in every part of speech individually. Thanks, Tony! This was great!

Creating the Standards

Quizzing Students

The Results!

By generating a report based on the standard, I can view the students' results based on each specific part of speech. This allows me to see where my students are doing well, and where I need to do some re-teaching later. Overall, this was a really great new aspect of CPS that will make these assignments much more meaningful!

Cps Data

Powerful Women in Literature

I found this link while browsing the internet the other night and I thought it was very interesting. I liked their choices, especially because they chose characters from both classic and modern literature. Check it out below! 

10 of the Most Powerful Women in Literature

Courtroom Lingo

As we get closer to the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, the students will need to brush up on their courtroom lingo in order to follow the events of Atticus's iconic speech. Below is a screenshot of a web-quest that I did with my students to prepare them. For this lesson, I used Edmodo and a couple of sites I found relating to the vocabulary. Students worked together to find the definitions of these terms. This prepared them to read the courtroom scene without time-consuming interruptions to explain what the terms being used meant.

Jury Service

Glossary of Courtroom Terms