(edited June 2017) I did up this poster in 2015 when I was trying to find ways to cope with my child’s meltdowns. After working with my child for a few years, I have come to have a better und…
I have introduced this into my Special Day Class to talk about how big their problem is and different ways problems can be solved. I have created a big chart that is at the front of the class and each student has a small one on their desk. For students who are able to identify and write- I have cr...
Psychopaths are everywhere. They are your toxic boss, controlling boyfriend, lazy colleague, annoying mother-in-law and negligent friend - the person who gets away with bad behaviour time and time again. While often superficially charming, they are also rude, aggressive, manipulative, duplicitous and dishonest. Five per cent of the population is psychopathic, which means they are missing the critical human ingredient of empathy. Because they are programmed to put themselves first, these people routinely disrupt and even destroy relationships and organisations, seemingly without consequence. Drawing on the latest science, bestselling author David Gillespie offers a detailed and practical guide to identifying the psychopath in your midst, then managing the behaviour to minimise the effect on your family, workplace, friendship group or community organisation. Praise for Taming Toxic People 'This compelling study and guidebook is a must-have for anyone who has a pathologically difficult individual in their life.' Kim Williams 'Gillespie is academically gifted, a linguist, excellent at most things he turns his mind to ... he's a polymath, an old-fashioned Renaissance man, who finds few things dull and everything else interesting.' Courier Mail 'David Gillespie has done a tremendous service to the general public in writing this book.' Huffpost
GLASTONBURY fans were left seriously distracted by Billy Idol’s “shambolic and chaotic” performance. Towards the end of his Saturday afternoon Glastonbury show, the music legend e…
Literary Essay We are just about to finish up our third writing unit from Teacher's College/Lucy Calkins, so I wanted to share how it went, what we did, what worked and what (definitely) did not work! This quarter we focused on writing Literary Essays, which, before working my way through this unit, I could not have explained to anyone! So, since I wasn't 100% sure what a Literary Essay was and I knew my students weren't either, we started by just reading a bunch of sample essays and discussing what they were. Our writing kit comes with access to several examples of Literary Essays written by students, so we read over a few of them and discussed our findings, and then I put together an anchor chart of all of the things we noticed (or that I wanted them to notice and they didn't). For the first bend of this unit, instead of using an actual text, we watched the Panyee Football Club Video and used that as our "piece of literature". Although I think it was a bit confusing for them that we used a video in the first bend and then used text in the second bend, I do think that this was a nice way to start the unit because they didn't mind watching, re-watching, and analyzing bits of the video over and over again. After watching the video a few times, I asked them to look for common themes, lessons, character traits, etc... I emphasized that one way to come up with a claim is to pinpoint something in the text/video that you have seen before and we discussed how the characters worked hard like the characters in many different stories and movies, how people didn't believe in them at first which we see in a lot of stories, etc... Below is a list of all of the claims that we came up with: After that, I had them pick a few claims and try out writing a thesis statement/lead/introduction (I'm trying to use all three terms so they know that they all mean the same thing). We used the graphic organizer below to do this and when students felt that they had one claim that they could write a strong thesis statement for, they chose that as the one that they would use to write the rest of their essay. Once we all had our claims and thesis statements ready to go, we worked on collecting evidence from the video in order to create strong body paragraphs. Finally, they wrote their own essays and I took home a stack of 36 papers ready to grade them all over the weekend. Unfortunately, however, when I started to read them, I noticed that more than half of both of my classes wrote summaries of the entire video instead of actual Literary Essays. They included quotes and plenty of details from the video, but they just did not seem to get that they were supposed to focus only on the parts of the video that supported their claim. At that point I decided to create a checklist for writing a Literary Essay and I used it to score all of their essays. Before giving the essays back, I showed them the checklist and had them use it to grade two of the sample student essays that we had looked at at the beginning of the unit. I think that seeing what I expected to be included in each section of the checklist as well as being able to read samples of text that included all of the necessary components really helped them to figure out what they needed to do. I gave them more time to edit and revise using the checklist and their second drafts were much better! For the second bend, they were able to choose their texts and they completed most of the writing process on their own with guidance when needed or requested. I hung up the chart below and had them stick a sticky note with their name on it to whichever step they were on each day. Our team agreed that the suggested texts for this bend were a little too long and complex for our students, so we decided on four short stories: (We just googled these titles and found PDFs of them online that we printed for the kids) Everything Will Be Okay by James Howe Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting The Marble Champ by Gary Soto Birthday Box by Jane Yolen* *Disclaimer: I cried when I read this one aloud to the class We did have to go back and review transition words and when/how to use them in the middle of this bend, so I made this chart as a reference tool: Now they are all typing up their essays and I will be grading them (hopefully) over spring break! If you are interested in using any of my anchor charts and/or graphic organizers that I created for this unit you can grab them here! Growing Words I have not been doing the best job of keeping up with our Growing Words (a.k.a. Greek & Latin prefixes, root words, and suffixes) this quarter so this week we dove back in to that starting with the Root Words Aqua- and Hydr-, which both mean water. On day 1 I introduced the root words using my little presentation that you can grab here. And for the rest of the week they followed the routine that they are used to & used some worksheets that are included in that product to further explore those root words. Guide Words Last week I posted all about my Word Reference Materials unit which worked out really nicely for most of my kids, but I have a few who are really struggling with answering questions about guide words. They just can't seem to wrap their mind around the fact that they need to alphabetize and check if a word comes after the first guide word and before the second guide word. I've been trying to give them some strategies to tackle these questions like writing the alphabet at the top of their page, putting the words in between the guide words and checking the alphabetical order, etc... I even made them this little anchor chart to refer back to, which sadly got a little crumpled in the laminator. Here is a digital copy in case you are interested in using it in your classroom! We practiced using these strategies with a few questions in a presentation that you can grab for free below!
What are the meanings behind Lena Dunham's tattoos?
These free printable self esteem worksheets for kids and adults are an easy way to boost feelings of self-worth, confidence, and gratitude.
I’m back today to report to you that I DID NOT have to suck it up and eat the larva for snack today. And…PTL…I remembered my math & literacy stations AND I got a full 7 hours sleep…minus 30 minutes here and there thanks to a cover hogging husband :) Yes friends, today was MUCH …
This is not a fun thing to admit, but I used to be a toxic person. In fact, my level of toxicity hurt everyone in my life and drove many people away. I was a master at being selfish and making everything about me — all the time. It made a…
Alas Poor Quoter Verily I testify, thy silent donkey did wend it’s way across my view. I was doing some stuff this morning and ran in to this profound message image. Me being after all, me, I…
Contractions are way more fun when you can pretend to be a surgeon! My kiddos did so great with this lesson. Check out what resources I used and how we made contractions fun with med school. 🙂 First of all I must say how amazing my team is! I’m not sure if I’ve said it Read More
Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? What a fun thing to celebrate (not just in April, but all year)! Poetry is one of my favorite teaching tools for all readers, but especially reluctant and struggling readers. There are SO many ways to use poetry with kids, but I want to highlight just ... Read More about 6 Ways to Use Poetry with Kids
On the 24th June 2019 I reached my Slimming World target. To find out how I did it - including all my facts, figures and before and after weight and measurements - then this is the post for you! #SlimmingWorld #SlimmingWorldTargetMember #SWTargetMember #Weightloss
