Week 2 of June School

This week was the half-way point for June School.  After 2:10 today, there are only four days left.  And a lot of my students have earned enough minutes to finish a few days/hours early.  That's worked out really well, and students seemed to really feel a sense of ownership when they could choose when to do their time.  They really wanted me to come in at 6:30 every day, and there were always a few who wanted to stay until 3:30 (usually different kids...the most time any student completed in one day was a little over 9 hours...with no breaks.  Crazy).  Because of early starts and the intensity of #flipcon I'm struggling a little bit with tiredness, and residual sadness at leaving a job I love and in which I have invested so much.

Part of the craziness of FlipCon12 was that I spent one day teaching and doing virtual attendance.  Here's what it looked like:

Twitter+Flipcon Streaming+Posting the DOL=epic #multitasking.  Notice that my RSS reading (I always read my Google Reader feed with my kids each day) was an AskMetafilter (my other internet obsession) forum question about using a skin graft as a wedding ring (i.e. each person has skin taken from the ring finger and grafted onto their spouse's ring finger).  Never a dull moment in my RSS feed.

Here I'm also monitoring their Edmodo assignments.

Leo thought it was funny to post that he was bored.  He wouldn't have been if he had been watching Aaron Sams and Jon Bergmann's plenary session. 

And here you can see that the kids are still turning in work, even while I was at FlipCon.

Last one:

I BROKE THE TWITTERZ! :-)

I'll post my thoughts on Bergmann/Sams' Plenary and the sessions I attended later.

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Anyway, we're at the point in the Skills assignments that they are planning or working on their finals. 

Here is what I gave them for their finals:

Vocab/Speaking Final: Research this question and prepare a presentation to teach your chosen strategy to other students: "What strategies can you use to help you understand the meaning of words you don't know?"

Research Skills/Essay Final: Research one of the questions we developed together (about the Holocaust) and write up what you found into a research essay.

Show Not Tell/Creative Writing/Grammar Final: (recycled from Resilience Project) Write an original short story with the theme of resilience.  Must use show-not-tell language and proper grammar/conventions.

Theme/Reading Final: Read a section of Rena's Promise, write an objective summary, and find evidence of a theme.  Write a one paragraph objective summary, then write a claim paragraph defending your choice of theme with evidence from the text.

Grammar Final: Get a DOL perfect.

Those are all the major skills in my summer school class, so I feel pretty good about the amount and quality of work they are producing.  And giving them a week to work on the finals (or for some of them, two days...since they've banked so many minutes so far) feels about right. 

Other than the research essay, I've been pretty flexible with how they can show me mastery (i.e. what the final product is).  I'll post some of the results when they finish.

Looking forward to the weekend, but more than that, I'm looking forward to having a Google+ hangout with fellow English-flipper Troy Cockrum (Twitter: @tcockrum) tomorrow morning.  He's so much farther down the garden path than I am that I'm excited to see what I can learn from him.