Sunday, April 26, 2009

Live Blogging about what Middle School is Really Like

The 6th grade language arts classes at KMS (Bortner, Brunelli, Mendez, and Springer) hope to have a live blogging conversation (via Cover it Live) with some of the 5th grades in the district in a few weeks time about the "big transition" to middle school. We envision having the 6th graders talk about what one needs to know, learn, and understand when coming to middle school and transitioning out of elementary school. We hope that fifth grade classes will want to participate, especially those from schools that feed into Kearney. Hopefully, this conversation will be like a question and answer session between students, with the teachers merely facilitating.

We can have students in small groups around individual computers or teachers can choose to have one computer going while students have the conversation with the teacher typing and paraphrasing. I still need to look at the next unit to see how this is going to tie in with the GLETs, but I don't foresee that being an issue.

If anyone has any pointers or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,

Liz

3 comments:

doug.abshire said...

Hey!

If appropriate, I'd like to add a couple of 9th graders to the dialogue for a "future" HS perspective. Just a couple or three, not more. Please count me in and let me know the particulars. My selected students could participate anytime between 8:15 - 10:30 and then 11:00 - 1:15.

Would really enjoy being part of this!

Doug (ACHS)

Joseph Miller said...

Great idea! We have been talking a lot about transition lately. Perhaps you could get the students to talk academics in addition to the social and practical transitions. I wonder if the middle school students could recommend summer reading.

Elizabeth Hopkins said...

Doug, I'm sure we could have some 9th graders participate. That would be fun. Joe, we will definitely talk academics in addition to other areas of middle school life. I think summer reading suggestions are a great idea. Thanks for the ideas guys.