I am a passionate middle school Humanities teacher, but anyone who knows me also knows that I am a passionate lover of the Beautiful Game – football. No, I don’t mean American football, I mean what locals here call soccer. When I heard seven years ago that the 2022 FIFA World Cup would take place…
NaNoWriMo
In the middle school writing rotation, fiction writing came up on my unit map this year. While I have a curriculum that I regularly use to teach writing, I had a crazy idea- what if my students participated in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? NaNoWriMo is traditionally an adult-led tradition where people worldwide commit…
Racial Justice
In March and April, the middle school students completed a racial justice unit in ELA class. One group of students read Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and another read Blended by Sharon M. Draper for their book clubs and discussed the books weekly. Both groups also read articles about the origins of the Black…
Cross-Curricular Connections
The middle school as a whole is reading the young reader’s edition of “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” this month in their student-led book clubs. This book is a memoir that tells the story of a Malawian teen living through famine in the early 2000s and his mission to learn enough about renewable energy…
Multi-Age Classes
Something that is relatively unique to this school is that we have multi-age classes. While I was growing up, and while completing my teaching degree, there was always a negative tone when speaking about a “split” class, like it was a bad thing. But that causes someone to think- Why would multi-age classes be a…
Cooking Video With A Familiar Face
https://youtu.be/KExB1B47nwA