Creating Presentations

Friday, the students began or continuted working on their PowerPoint presentations or finding and printing pictures for their posters. It was a good day, and everyone was engaged in their assignment. Some of the students chose to work individually on their presentation, and most of them chose to work in pairs or small groups. They understand that their presentation must be 4-5 minutes in length, and that they all have to participate in the production and presentation of the information.

On Monday, there was no school because of Labor Day. So, on Tuesday, we met in the trailer, and I brought brownies to share with everyone. In each class, somone asked, "Miss, why are we getting brownies today?" I told them, "You're getting brownies because I am so proud of each of you for working hard on your research projects." This made them very happy, and it did make them feel good about the work they've done. Before I gave them the brownies (while I still had their attention!), we did a quick review about citations. I wrote 3 citations on the board, leaving 6-8 mistakes in each of them. The students had to copy the citations onto their paper, and correct the mistakes. We worked together to correct them on the board. This was good because I saw that many of the students were still confused about when to used quotations or underline for titles.

Tuesday was a different story... it was a bad day. Many of the students were unfocused, were in a bad mood, or were just plain lazy. Today was their last day in the computer lab to work on their presentations. I was thinking about booking another day for them to be in the lab, but then I had second thoughts. No. If they still aren't finished after I've given them plenty of time to work, they'll need to finish on their own time. Yes! It was so liberating to set my mind on putting the responsibility on the student (where it should be!). I'm not going to give as many chances or be as sympathetic to students who don't get their work done. That just takes up too much of my time and energy, and makes them think it's OK to slack off.

Today was a much better day. For my LA classes, I gave my students an MLA Citations Review of 25 questions. There were different sections where students had to identify the correct citation, answer True/False questions about MLA format, fix incorrect citations, and label the parts of a citation. It was interesting to see how much they've learned from our research project. They had to complete the review quietly and independently first, and then we went over it as a class. I heard one student say to himself, "This is a good review." That made me happy. What I really liked, though, was when most students got a question incorrect, they wanted to know what the right answer was and WHY it was the right answer. I love that! To make sure I called on them randomly, I put all of their names on popsicle sticks, and picked the sticks out of a cup. It's so funny how quiet the room gets right before I pick a stick. Everyone waits to hear their name. :) It was a lot more fun than I planned.

Tomorrow, I want to start giving the students tips on how to give a professional presentations. I want to show them example cue cards, and show them how to used a PowerPoint slide show effectively as PART of the presentation. The focus, they need to understand, should be on the speaker and not the slide show. I'm not sure how best to convey this to them....

In my LDC IV classes, the students worked on a review of 9 sets of questions over Chapters 1-8 of Tuck Everlasting. I could tell which students had been paying attention, and which ones were clueless. One of my students, K____, actually fell asleep with his earphones in his ears during reading time on Monday! When I handed him the review, he just sat there and stared at it for about 15 minutes. When I noticed him, I told him it would be better to go back and read what he missed on Monday. Most of the students did pretty well in refering back to the book to find answers to the questions. I included the page numbers where they could find the answers, but they had to do the rest themselves.