Class News Letters

How can you make sure students are understanding what they read in a way other than quizzing them (either on paper or verbally?) This is an age-old question for teachers, and for a good reason. Students can't be led to higher order thinking if they don't have the basic comprehension down.

Reading "Taming of the Shrew" was really difficult for my students at first. They had previously only read one other play by Shakespeare ("Romeo and Juliet"), and most of the students listened to a recording of it.

I wanted my students to take parts and actually read the story a loud for many reasons, but a lot of students complained that they were having difficulty with the basic plot line.

I decided to incorporate a few different objectives for this review project to try and make it a little more excited by having each section of my sophomores create a weekly newsletter update about the play. My plan did not work perfectly, and in fact it ended up taking so much time we only did it twice. I will discuss what we did, what went wrong, and what went right.

What we did:

I created a quick Power Point with four of five basic outlines for newsletters and showed the kids each one. I allowed each class to vote on the layout they wanted.

I allowed each class to choose a name for their newsletter. 6th period chose "#ChargerNation" and 7th period chose "The Earlobe Crusaders." All I have to say is: ten points for creativity.

I asked each class what sections they wanted their newsletter to include. I threw out there the sections I thought would work the best (since they covered the major plot developments). I think we had two writing sections (general update and relationship update), and one section for a student drawing depicting a scene from what we read.

Originally, I set a schedule and assigned three students from each class to cover one of the sections Monday-Friday, ever week, until we finished the book. My plan was to have these students use this project as their Bell Work, and present their newsletter to the rest of the class so anyone who was having trouble with comprehension would have som reinforcement and not spend days lost in the story. The rest of the kids who were not working on the newsletter that day would work on the normal Bell Work.

What was good about this:

It was a bit of a break from all the serious stuff.

Students felt like they had ownership over their own classe's project.

It was a good review for the students who had to write or draw a picture.

What was bad about the way we did it:

I did not pre-teach the way I wanted the writing. I wasn't expecting the students to really write in a journalistic style, since that wasn't my main goal (although if that is one of your class objective this would be a great project). I told students I wanted a 5-6 sentence summary of what we had read that week. This would have been a great tool for assessing writing weaknesses and strengths, but I had to chose not to address that because of a very tight schedule.

It ended up taking so much time that we only did it once a week, and only for the first two weeks of the unit. I don't think I structured the activity well enough that students could come in and get it completed for their Bell Work. If I had to do this over again, I would maybe have students do an update for each act, and have each student do his own update individually on a piece of paper. That way they wouldn't be relying on anyone else to get his work done. I try really hard to have collaborative work in the classroom, but for my students this was not a good collaborative exercise.

Here is a picture of the four newsletter updates my classes did:

 I think the foundation of this exercise is great, but each teacher definitely needs to carefully consider the needs of her own classroom.