Frankin
Frannkleen
Ms... Ms....
Teacher?
Filkin
Filklin
etc.
Never my real name, which is odd. If they're having trouble with my name this year, how are they going to get Devenport next year?
Anyhow, I've had quite the success with my Donner Party Scrapbook Project. I've helped the kids out a little, printing out color pictures and helping them with their spelling and whatnot; I just want them to be proud of their work. And while, yes, a lot of them rushed straight through it so they could play today, much of their work went above and beyond my expectations.
With the Read180 program, the students are at Level 1 at the moment, and we're reading a very, very simplified version of what happened to the Donners, and how they ended up eating the dead in order to survive their entrapment in the mountains. However, I would change something before beginning this scrapbooking project again: reading the book half-way through and having them do the project made them a little more confused than if we were to have read the whole way through. That was my bad; I should have been smarter about it before jumping into a very extensive project where the students needed to know the information about the Donners (not that half of them would have picked up on the fact that they ate the dead; it's like a line out of the whole book). I'm sure that reading this, you are thinking, "Umm... what were you thinking? Of COURSE they would need the whole story!" I was just too pumped about the project to think that far ahead, of course. But, the students loved it!
"Ms. Filklin, do you think it would be cool if I made the history of the Donner Party into a little booklet of my own? I'll even color the pages and everything!" (Maria, 6th)
"Will I get extra credit if I include CPR and Hypothermia together?" (Seth, 6th)
"What? They eated people? Now why would they do that?" (Dzenaijla, 8th).
One eighth grade boy, Damir, chose to be the Pictoralist, and called me over to him while he was looking at pictures that people had painted of the Western landscape. "Ms... Ms.. Fran..k. C'mere. There's a UFO in this picture. Fer real. A UFO."
I walked over and saw that he had the mouse held down over the picture, making it so that there was a circle with a line in the middle (think No Smoking signs). "Ah. See? I knew they existed! X-Files was RIGHT."
Damir giggled and said, "Naw, man, they don't exist. That's fake. See? This one's the real thing. See the dot? That's a UFO."
It was a tiny black speck on the painting. "Oh man, I was so fooled."
"Man! Ms. Frank! UFOs don't exist!"
Later today, when he and Juan turned in their work for the pictoralist, he stood expectantly, staring at me. I looked up at him and said, "Yes?"
"You gonna look at my pictures or what?" He giggled and looked over at Juan, and wouldn't meet my eyes.
I looked down and was completely shocked at the quality of their work; they had put a lot into the pictures, and I was about to praise him and Juan when I noticed something odd in the corner of each picture: A single UFO. In every picture. It was hilarious! I laughed pretty hard, and Damir and Juan got a big kick out of it as well. It felt like a great bonding moment, considering I've had some trouble with them in the past.
Damir is also teaching me Bosnian. He taught me, after I replied with a "thank you" to him, that in Bosnian you say Hfala (Heefahlah). I put it on the word wall, and a lot of the Bosnians questioned me on if whether I knew Bosnian. I gladly let them know that Damir took all the credit, and he blushed heavily and said, "Naw. Naw man. Naw."
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