Friday, March 11, 2011

A Test Is Not The Only Way To Show What You Know...

This week, after finishing reading Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in literature circle groups, the 7th grade reorganized into groups based on student interest and began work on body biographies: life-sized portraits of some of the main characters from the novel.

Although students feel that they need a little more time (just one more day!) to finish adding the perfect symbols, words, and quotes from the novel to represent their characters, the results of just two days of work are impressive! Watching the 7th grade work on this project (while barking orders and trying to keep everyone on schedule), I was reminded how important projects like these can be. Small group work not only helps us to better understand our stories and characters through discussions, debate, and re-reading, but can also help to prepare us to work well with others and improve on solving problems with patience and compassion when issues arise (and they usually do when we work with others!).

Students, check out the video below of your body biographies and answer the following questions for this week's blog prompt (due Friday, March 18th) in complete sentences. Commentaries with sentence fragments, or one word answers, will receive a zero.

  • What are your body biography’s strengths? (What are you most proud of?)
  • What do you wish you had had more time to accomplish?
  • What is one thing you learned or realized about your character or about ROT during this activity?
  • Comment on another group's body biography.  Which details: symbols, colors, quotes worked well and why?
  • Appreciations. Who do you appreciate working with in your group and why?
**As always, remember to compose your commentary in a google document.  Proofread for CUPS (Capitalization, Usage, Punctuation, and Spelling before posting).  Commentaries that do not use TAGS (Turn the question around, Answer the question, Give examples, and Summarize) will not receive full credit.  


Roll of Thunder - Body Biographies from lacey boland on Vimeo.

Music from the video by Sam Cooke and Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.