Mr Hammerlund

Two (and a half) more days until summer vacation. Then a few more days after that and I am done with the course I am taking. A week from today I will be free.

One of my students gave an answer today that made me feel like I have done something right this year. In an assembly of the elementary students, the elementary coordinator asked all the students a question: What did you learn this year?  Most other students talked about facts or this and that. I actually thought some of the answers were pretty good. Then one of my students raised his hand and I felt tense. I was worried that this little guy was going to give a boneheaded answer. Instead he replied, " Teamwork ". Brilliant.

Today I video taped the lesson for this class. Splicing the video was a real challenge since I am not used to using a Mac and I thought that creating the video in iMovie would be the best choice. That was a headache. The lesson went really well. It was the first time that I have incorporated role play into a lesson. Wow! The students really enjoyed that aspect. They liked it so much that they begged to extend the lesson. When I asked what they liked about it, they said that they liked feeling that they were actually an artist [in this case] and one student said that they wanted to continue it. I was really surprised by this. First of all I didn't expect that they would like it so much, but then they took the activity seriously on top of that. Especially for EAL students, this will be a powerful tool next year. As for the inquiry part of the lesson, that surprised me as well. I had several parts of the lesson planned, but didn't do any of them since the students were so en...