friday of the first week: interruptions

On Thursday night, I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I had been working at a crazy pace all week and just couldn't ramp myself back up. At 8:30, I tucked myself into bed and set my alarm for 4:30am.

What do you know... I finished my work that morning quicker than I would have if I had struggled through it the night before.  I even managed to put together an outfit that earned me a lot of compliments, which I have to say was a nice boost to a tired Friday.

Here's what was on the docket:
E9A
-Figurative vs. Literal Language. I used "Stereo Heart" by Gym Class Heroes to have students identify language that had more than one meaning. Drax, from Guardians of the Galaxy was a fun tie-in for showing LITERAL meaning. Not as many students saw the movie as I had hoped, but the handful that did appreciated the reference. 

-Simile vs. Metaphor. From figurative language, we spiraled into more specifics by defining a simile vs. a metaphor. We went back to "Stereo Hearts" and labeled the previously identified figurative language as either a simile or metaphor. Then, we switched to a 2nd example: "Happy" by Pharrell has exactly 1 metaphor and 1 simile, so it's a fun example that you need to pay attention to!

SS
-Thinking Map: Tree map. We classified what they love about stories by using a tree map. 
-Preassessment for short story elements.

SC11
-Preassessment for The Young Man and the Sea. I used this to check their writing skills in preparation for the theme essay we'll write and to get a better understanding of their reading/inferencing skills.

Success? B
+Students were very engaged in the examples & memes I used along with my figurative language lesson in my 9th grade class.  I feel good about this one because I actually came up with it myself! (Can I get an amen, teachers?!) On Monday, we'll go deeper where they have to find their own examples in songs that they like and then eventually create similes and metaphors themselves.
-My 1st hour was interrupted 5-6 times with staff coming in for schedule changes and whatnot. That class was great about the disruption, but it just threw the flow off. I realized about 10 minutes into my 2nd hour that I was still in that disrupted place and that lesson was clunkier than it should have been.
-4 new students were added to my 2nd hour, bringing that class up to 36. I need to get those four caught up on things.
+In my 9th grade class, they wrote a scene from last night's reading from the police officer's perspective and shared in small groups. Each group selected a piece of writing and a reader (didn't have to be the same person). We built an encouraging environment by welcoming each reader to the stage by applauding them to the stage and applauding them back to their desk. It was a fun strategy that I learned through my NUA training in August.