Peer editing is a wonderful tool…if done effectively. When students read one another’s work, they are able to see and fix errors in their peers’ papers, as well as translate those changes to their own papers. They are also able to read with a critical eye and put themselves in a teacher’s seat for a moment, hopefully looking at their work from a flipped perspective. Continue reading
My Honors kids have been struggling with thesis statements. They have great ideas, they just aren’t articulating them into arguments. And thus their papers (and grades) are suffering. So I decided to do something a little different for their Old Man and the Sea papers. I wanted to help them out. Continue reading
The next objective for my Honors 10 students was to write a thesis statement. In the class before, they had (on their own) brainstormed topics to write their research papers on. Now they were told to pick a topic/question and bring a thesis statement to class. Continue reading
Now that my students have presented on the Old Man and the Sea, their next objective was to write a paper on the book…but just like with the projects, I wanted the students to have ownership–they were going to pick their own topics!
For today’s lesson, I wanted to spice things up a bit. Over the past few days, the students in my Honors 10 classes had read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. The book is small, easy to read, but packed with symbolism and author influences. I wanted to see how much the students had comprehended, but I also wanted to challenge them to think deeply about the book–going beyond the simple plot line. Continue reading
