Although I’m currently a high school teacher, I have also taught middle school students and loved it. One of my favorite reasons for teaching middle school was the class energy the students had. Not yet in their teens, they had this youthful aspect which really offered some humor to their project based learning assignments. I’m trying to keep this kind of creativity going in my ninth graders and also trying to reintroduce my tenth through twelfth graders to some fun projects that help them learn.
My ninth graders come into class towards the later end of the afternoon. Our school has seven periods a day and the ninth graders have me fifth period. They’ve already had lunch, have just had another class, and then after a fifteen minute break they will have two more periods before they get to go home. So, usually when they come into their classroom, they’re headed towards some sort of afternoon lull. Just the other day, one of my students came in during the passing period. I always greet my students with a “hello” when they come in, but she headed to her desk and as I did some grading, I noticed she and her friend were chatting. She had her head on the desk and was repeatedly saying the word “bored” to her friend.
This might sound really strange to you, but around the time of their autobiographical event essays, we had gotten into a practice of spending about 5-7 minutes sharing stories to give the students oral storytelling practice and to get the creative juices flowing. That feels like a long time ago since it was the beginning of October, but now sometimes if I see this dreaded lull setting in, I aim to reignite their energy. The classroom has three rows (11 students) so sometimes I have each row quickly decide between each other who should tell a joke and other times a student has a story to share. Sometimes we just do a quick classroom cheer. I find the students don’t always need a little pick-me-up, but this was apparently one of those days.
That day we were doing a lesson and activity from a book I’ve found extremely useful for teaching students how to structure an academic essay: Persuasion Points: 82 Strategic Exercises for Writing High-Scoring Persuasive Essays by Brian Backman. It’s aimed, as you can tell, for persuasive writing (Grade 9-10 CA Standard 1.3) and it’s therefore really useful for teaching students the importance of essay structure including how to write an effective thesis statement that makes a “roadmap” of where the essay will go. I had already taught the students how to read or “preview” a paragraph to predict where the essay or story will go and how to decipher a thesis statement, but from their essays on A Tale of Two Cities, I could see that they could use some instruction specifically on how to write their own effective thesis statements as it’s the backbone of any academic essay.
You’d be surprised how much fun learning to write a thesis statement can be. And this issue of “bored” had to be taken away, stat, for their learning to be exciting. Luckily another student had a solution. They shared their joke, which eased the lull, and then I gave a short teacher-led micro lesson about what a thesis is vs. a thesis statement and guided them through the beginning of the activity. Next they had two short aspects to do individually. During the first stint, I gave them an allotted amount of time and walked around the room, seeing that they were doing it right and coaching anyone who needed help. Next, I asked the students to think about as many topics as possible with which they could generate their own thesis statements. Those completed and shared, we had a few minutes for them to work in groups, so I broke them up into groups to collaboratively generate up to five thesis statements. If there was enough time, each group could present their favorite thesis statement.
As class came to a close, one group decided to present all of their thesis statements and essentially made a miniature presentation. No one, including the one who had been “bored”, realized that class was over. I thanked them for another day and secretly thanked them for another win. I love it when I can get that fifth period ninth grade class to not realize when class is over.
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