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Hello Parents, Guardians, and Students,
I haven’t updated this blog all spring semester--it has been a bit of a wild ride since the beginning of February! Parents and students new to me this semester, I try to give a rundown each month of what we are up to! Now, with this extended and highly unexpected shut down, I wanted to reach out to parents and guardians and let you know that I’m still working hard from home and available to students who need me. First, The College Board (company in charge of AP) is being very open and responsive to schools as we navigate these unique circumstances. We are going to do our best to prepare students for AP tests in May, and I think if students stay engaged with what’s offered on Schoology, they will be just fine. Beyond preparing for testing, this is a wonderful time for your students to flex those writing muscles. What a time to start a journal!! A student remarked in class, “this is our generation’s 9/11” and I think that’s accurate. This will be that memory that they tell their children about--that crazy time everything was canceled for a month. One of my most treasured possessions is a book of emails my mother made for me of our email exchanges in the year following 9/11. I was a first year teacher living abroad and she was a very worried mother. She printed every email exchange we had that year and years later gave them to me. It captures perfectly how I was feeling at the time because it was a daily account of how I was processing such an overwhelming experience. Encourage your students to sit down and write everyday. What did you do today? How did you fill all this open time? What are you wondering about? My own kids and I are doing this (along with adding pictures of our at-home activities) and I think it will be something they treasure when they are adults remembering this experience. As for the actual school work I’d like your students to do, here’s the plan as of now--all documents and details are on Schoology for students to access. For AP Seminar students: We are in the middle of preparing our second portfolio entry. The first is complete and we just need to upload papers to the Digital Portfolio. We will do that when we return. On Friday I walked students through a detailed calendar that would help them stay on track with their Individual Written Arguments. Those are still due April 3 and, honestly, this forced time off might work to the students’ benefit. This first week they should be planning their essays and outlining. The research is pretty much complete. I have asked them to submit outlines and intros this week, and I will give them feedback on those. Next week they might need a little more encouragement because that’s when they should be doing the bulk of their writing. We will have a shared class spreadsheet on Schoology for them to track their daily progress. I’m hoping that seeing their peers’ progress will help motivate them. This is a 2000 word essay and I’ve found that breaking that word count up by days tends to help students chip away at the task. If they shoot for 400 words a day Monday-Thursday, we will be ready to give each other some feedback in week three. Week three will be dedicated to peer and self editing with final drafts due in Turnitin.com on Friday. In an ideal world, all of the students will be able to meet these deadlines and we will be ready to hit the ground running with final presentations when we return. HOWEVER, we have seen in recent days that “ideal” doesn’t always happen!! If your student gets sick or needs to help with childcare of younger siblings and doesn’t have time for this, or something else comes up, please encourage them to reach out to me. I can be flexible with deadlines and can support them as we figure out a different timeline. For AP Language students: We are actually in a really solid place for AP Language. Students have learned all of the necessary skills for the exam and March and April are always dedicated to simply practicing and refining those skills. We can do that remotely!! The other AP Language teachers and I have developed a schedule for practicing reading and writing for the next three weeks. It is posted on Schoology with all necessary documents. Students are working on one essay per week and receiving specific feedback on how to revise and improve it from their teacher. Aside from encouraging them to engage in this practice and revision, you can help by timing them! For their first drafts, we want them to practice writing their essays by hand, under a time constraint. Please encourage your student to sit at a table, write in pen, and use a timer. We want to give feedback on what they can actually do in a timed situation! They will be able to revise, but our feedback can be more targeted if they’re honest about the timing. We are also providing reading and multiple choice practice via AP Classroom each week. Students have individual accounts that they can access from home and we will be able to check their progress. Finally, they need to be reading and watching the news! We will continue our weekly practice of contextual pool and vocabulary notebooks. This is a great time to really dig into that work. I have posted a list of documentaries that students can use to learn about topics for their contextual pools. Please note that some of the topics covered in these documentaries are college/adult level. You may wish to look over the list of documentaries with your student and choose ones that are appropriate for your student together. Common Sense Media is an excellent resource to help you examine content without pre-screening it! I’m also available via email to give specific book recommendations. I tried to send every student home with at least one independent novel to read, but I’m happy to give additional suggestions when they finish those! I also created an “If You’re Bored” folder with even more optional practice!! If your students need more to work on, encourage them to dig around in that folder and look for activities that are interesting to them. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Please reach out via email if you have any questions. As I’ve told the students, I look forward to staying in contact with them virtually throughout the shutdown. I don’t know if I have the patience to be a stay-at-home mom to my two little ones, so I will need all of your teenagers to keep checking in on me!!
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Well, we all survived the Mock Performance Task 2. It wasn’t pretty in some cases, but everyone ended up finishing the task and (I think) learning a good deal about how to manage a large, independent project. Many students struggled mightily with breaking the work into manageable chunks, and I imagine many of you saw them scrambling to finish at the last minute. As I told them in class, as hard as it was for me to watch them struggle, I think they all learned a lot from that process. Hopefully, as we move into the real, College Board Performance Tasks, they will be a little (a lot?) more careful about working steadily over time. Final grades for those essays will hopefully be posted before the break. They will be in Schoology labeled “Mock IWA” (Individual Written Argument). I have promised my family that I will not bring any grading home over the break; now I’m having to practice what I preach to the students and work steadily all this week! I am posting grades and feedback for the Individual Multimedia Presentations as the presentations are occurring, so if students presented already, those grades are updated. In this final week before break, we will be forming groups for the first Performance Task. It is imperative that students think carefully about the topics they are interested in exploring as this is a project that they will work on for a number of weeks. Due to the group nature of the project, it is likely that not everyone will get to research exactly what they would like to research, but my goal is to get as close to that as possible. If you can, chat with your students in the next few days about potential research areas. This will help once we start narrowing ideas in class. Over break, students will have the option of beginning research but this is not an expectation. Many have expressed a desire to use that time to get a jump on things before midterm craziness sets in. Others are ready for a complete and total brain break. I think either option is completely fine, and I’d encourage you to talk with your student about his or her choice. When we return from break, students will have about three weeks to complete their Individual Research Reports (part one of the Performance Task) and then at midterms we will shift into the Team Multimedia Presentation preparation. There will not be any additional midterm for the course. I hope you all have a restful, relaxing break! Please let me know if you have any questions. Hattie Hello!
I wanted to check in one last time before break to let you know what we are working on and what you can expect to see for the rest of the semester. Our goal for the past two weeks has been to work hard now so we can rest and relax over break. Students are working on three things: Analysis and Argument Practice We have done a great deal of work on analytical and argumentative writing so far. During class we are practicing both skills with some shorter texts (mostly poetry). Encourage your students to take advantage of this practice as we will do some final assessment of those skills after break. This is their chance to get feedback from me without any grade (or stress!) attached. Research Process Piece We have been working steadily through the process of generating questions, engaging in research and drafting arguments based on that research. Please ask your students where they are in that process. This week they have opportunities every day to conference with me about their writing and receive feedback. My hope is that they will continue to work hard and turn their papers in early this Friday. The official due date is January 8, but many are in a position to have this off their plates prior to break. Independent Reading Project Students have chosen new independent reading books and all of them have chosen books that are a “push” into something a little more challenging. For many of them, that means reading nonfiction. Please ask them to tell you about their books! I’m excited about their choices. The only thing students need to do over break is continue reading these books. They don’t need to be finished when they return, but they should be at least halfway through. They will use these books for their midterm project. Students have all the details of the project already and it is posted on Schoology. Last thing! We are having a (contextual) Pool Party on Friday. I love a good theme and students have worked hard on deepening their contextual pools all year so far, so pool party it is! We will be working on making connections between the things we have already added to our contextual pool notebooks this year and our new independent reading books. Mrs. Bratney (our librarian) will be joining us as our guest lifeguard and giving us some easy tips for better researching skills. If you’d be willing to help us gather up some snacks for the day, feel free to sign up here. I hope you have a wonderful break and everyone gets some much needed time to rest and relax. Hattie Hello, Parents and Guardians!
We are wading into our second major “mock” performance task, so I thought I should update you on what’s going on. A refresher: Semester One of AP Seminar is about skill building and practice. Students participate in two “mock” performance tasks that are highly structured and teacher guided. They receive a LOT of feedback on these mock tasks. We have already completed performance task one; now we are beginning performance task two. Students also work on practicing the skills necessary for the end of course exam (EOC). We do practice exams throughout the semester and student grades improve as their skills grow. Semester Two of AP Seminar is when I have to step back. Students work on the real performance tasks (new topics, new groups) and those are uploaded to the College Board Digital Portfolio and scored externally. I am not allowed to give direct feedback, but I can give whole group instruction if I see gaps in student understanding. Because Semester Two is more “hands-off”, it is imperative that students engage in the feedback process this semester and ask questions NOW. For the first performance task, some struggled with this and waited until the last minute to ask for help. Their end products reflected that! As we move into this second performance task, we will be spending a lot of time talking about how to plan out a work flow and set small goals. We will also be working on how they can give each other feedback that is useful. The performance task two scoring guidelines are here. By the end of next week, students will have a research question approved by me. If you can get them to talk with you about their ideas this week, that would be great!! The more they talk through their ideas, the better their questions become. We will talk a lot about potential questions next week so that they can all get to one that is both arguable and has a potential solution. Once students have questions chosen, we will move into a research/writing workshop format for about two and a half weeks. I’ve arranged the calendar so that it’s possible for students to be completely done with a solid draft prior to Thanksgiving. I truly believe that breaks should be breaks. However, many of them have expressed a desire to work on their papers during break because they won’t have any other work to do. I want to give students that option, too, so papers won’t actually be due until the Wednesday after Thanksgiving (December 4). Please keep an eye on the work happening at your house and help your student make smart choices based on the plans your family has for Thanksgiving! They should also remember that they will only have limited time to conference with me after Thanksgiving, so even if they wait to do some of the writing that weekend, they should still be conferencing with me about their research and drafting prior to break. After Thanksgiving we will shift into the presentation portion of the performance task. This is exactly what the students did in performance task one except now they are doing it independently. Please offer to watch them practice!! Students will be presenting beginning December 10. Sorry for the lengthy update! If you made it to the end and have questions, feel free to email me. This class is a lot of juggling for the students, but they are learning some valuable time management skills along with the research and writing ones. Have a great weekend! Hattie Hello, Parents and Guardians!
I hope you’re staying warm this weekend. I haven’t updated you in awhile, so I thought it might be useful to check in and let you know what we are up to in AP Language. Unfortunately, I realized as I wrote that I have an awful lot to tell you about. If you are short on time and really just want to know what kind of things are due this month, skim to the bottom of each section for the italicized line. Writing We have shifted our focus from analysis to argumentation. During our analysis work, we examined the choices writers make to convey their arguments. Now, students will be flexing their own argumentation muscles while they make their own choices as writers. The big writing project they are working on this month is an open letter. Students have examined a number of them from various publications, brainstormed and planned for their own, and now they are drafting. They have complete freedom over the subject and purpose of the letter; the main thing I want to see is that their choices as a writer match their purpose. Some are funny, some are serious--that’s fine! They will have many opportunities over the next few weeks to have an individual conference with me about their drafts. Please encourage them to take advantage of that!! If you’re lucky, they might let you read their drafts, too. Make sure to ask them to tell you who their audience is and what they’re trying to accomplish with the letter. The final draft of the open letter will be due November 25. Reading Students are reading many different texts around the theme of Education for this unit. We are using all of these texts to continue practicing our analysis skills from the beginning of the year. Each text takes a different approach to the question “To what extent do our schools serve the purpose of a true education?” Students have read some contemporary texts so far and one classic text by James Baldwin. Next week we will dive into our most challenging text, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. All of them are in the Unit 2 folder on Schoology. Student understanding of these texts will be assessed two ways: a graded discussion at the end of next week, and an in-class analysis essay the following week. Low Stakes Practice We are also doing lots of independent reading and writing. Research shows that the more students have low stakes (not graded!) opportunities to read and write, the more confident they become with both skills. We read independent, student chosen novels everyday, and we are working hard to find the right balance between pushing ourselves toward more challenging texts and remembering that reading can and should just be for fun sometimes, too. Please ask your students what they are reading and share what you’re reading with them, too. Ask for a suggestion if you haven’t read for fun in awhile. Many of them are reading things any adult would enjoy! For practice writing, we are blogging about current events and sharing that writing with other AP Language students across the country. Last month we shared our writing with students in West Virginia and South Carolina. This month we are working with a school in New Hampshire. I’m so proud of the writing the students are producing and the thoughtful comments they’re providing to our online buddies. Their next blog post is due November 20 and they have lots of time to write those in class. I promised I wouldn’t post all their links here, but they might share them with you if you ask. Notebooks We just finished notebook language conferences and they were a delight!! Across the board, your students are engaging with the activity of seeking out new words, figuring out what they mean, and trying to use them. Many students reported that they “found” many of their words simply by listening more carefully to their parents. I guess an unintended benefit of this notebook is that they are listening to you more! Please encourage them to try out their new words and don’t hesitate to correct them if they’re using the word incorrectly. The hardest part of vocabulary acquisition is figuring out how to use the word. It’s easy to memorize definitions. It’s hard to actually learn a new word. Students should be updating their vocabulary notebooks regularly (five new words a week) and should have over fifty by now. If you made it to the end and you actually read it all, I’m impressed!! Sorry for the length, but I needed to share all of the great work your students are doing. We are working hard on balance and planning this year, too, so please let me know if they seem “swamped” with homework for my class. That should NOT be happening and is likely a product of poor use of time in class. We can fix that, but I need to know about it! Enjoy the rest of your weekend, Hattie Hello parents and guardians!
When my son started school, I learned quickly that school was always “fine” and they did “nothing” every single day!! It wasn’t until his second grade teacher had a blog that I learned all kinds of great things were happening in his classroom. So, this is my attempt to help you see that we are doing “something” and things are usually better than “fine”. I’ll probably update once a month, and I’ll always email to let you know! We have begun our study of language and rhetoric by practicing the skills of close reading and analysis of a variety of texts. Students have read everything from song lyrics to children’s books to op-eds to Ralph Waldo Emerson essays. With every text, we’ve examined three things:
I’d love to have your students lead you through an analysis of a commercial or an editorial you've read! They should be pros at it by now. We are finishing up this analysis unit and will build on our newfound analytical skills by adding argumentative writing to the mix in mid-October. At home, students should be working on adding entries to their vocabulary and contextual pool sections of their notebooks. They could also be reading their independent novels! They should never have more than thirty minutes of homework a night for AP Lang, but they should always have 30. If they tell you they have "nothing" to do, ask how their notebook entries are coming along! Sometimes those get forgotten by busy students. What’s in the Gradebook? If you’ve been monitoring Schoology, you’ll notice many assignments are listed as only worth 3 points in the “Formative Practice” category. These are practice only and do not count toward the students’ grades; however, they are incredibly important! If you see many 3s, you can rest assured that your student is doing his or her work in a timely fashion and performing proficiently. They will likely do well on future assessments. If you see mostly 2s, your student is only partially proficient and might need to ask more questions or see me for some help in AA. 1s indicate that the student attempted the assignment but definitely needs more help, 0s mean the student did not attempt the practice. Now that we are ending this unit, you’ll start to see larger assignments in each category. For example, today students participated in a graded discussion for 100 points in the Speaking and Listening category. Next week they will do another short, analytical writing assignment that will appear in the writing category. Please ask your students to share what they’re working on with you. I think you will be impressed with their sophisticated thinking. Have a great month! I’ll check in again at the end of October. Hello parents and guardians!
When my son started school, I learned quickly that school was always “fine” and they did “nothing” every single day!! It wasn’t until his second grade teacher had a blog that I learned all kinds of great things were happening in his classroom. So, this is my attempt to help you see that we are doing “something” and things are usually better than “fine”. I’ll probably update once a month, and I’ll always email to let you know! AP Seminar started with a thematic study of wealth, poverty and all things related to money. We read all kinds of different texts and examined the arguments the authors were making in those texts. Students also chose longer, nonfiction texts (hopefully you are seeing them reading those at home!) to supplement our discussion of wealth. We are using these readings to help us learn to break arguments apart and evaluate evidence. In the last two weeks we have moved into practicing for our first College Board Performance Task. Students are writing a 1200 word informative essay on a topic of their choosing. After they complete those essays, they will join with 3-4 peers to pool their information and create a team presentation. Final drafts of essays are due next Wednesday and presentations will be in two more weeks. Students will have opportunities to conference with me about their writing in class this week Thursday and Friday and next week Monday and Tuesday. After next week Wednesday, I hope you'll be hearing about their team presentations! If you're really lucky, they may share those with you. They are often very fun to watch. Please encourage your students to space out their work on the essays! We have talked many times in class about how to work in small chunks so as to avoid the dreaded “all nighter!” If you can reinforce that at home, I’d appreciate it. What’s in the Gradebook? If you’ve been monitoring Schoology, you’ll notice many assignments are listed as only worth 3 points in the “Formative Practice” category. These are practice only and do not count toward the students’ grades; however, they are incredibly important! If you see many 3s, you can rest assured that your student is doing his or her work in a timely fashion and performing proficiently. They will likely do well on future assessments. If you see mostly 2s, your student is only partially proficient and might need to ask more questions or see me for some help in AA. 1s indicate that the student attempted the assignment but definitely needs more help, 0s mean the student did not attempt the practice. As we move into October, you’ll start to see some larger assignments in Schoology as well. For instance, tomorrow I will enter the Research Conference assignment. Students walked me through their annotated bibliographies and answered questions about their research process. Most students did very well on this assignment. I encourage you to talk to your student about this research assignment. They did some fascinating work. I hope you have a great October! I’ll check back in at the end of the month. Hello, parents and guardians! I haven’t checked in for awhile, but I wanted to let you know what we are up to in AP Seminar. Students have completed their essays for the second performance task--a 2000 word Individual Written Argument--and have moved on to developing the presentation (6-8 minutes) of that argument. This Thursday we will do initial run-throughs of those presentations, and then students will have until next Wednesday (April 24), to practice.
The more you can do to encourage your students to practice for you this weekend, the better!! Very few students want to practice, but they’d all benefit from it. There’s something about practicing a presentation out loud that completely changes the game. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary. If they won’t practice for you, encourage them to practice out loud in front of the mirror, or for a younger sibling, or even the dog!! We will video presentations all day Wednesday, April 24, and then upload the videos and the papers the following day. Many of you have already had a chance to read your students’ papers, but if you have not, now would be a great time to offer to read those as well. Students have had lots of practice giving and asking for feedback from one another. You may want to ask them what you should be looking for as you read; they should be able to give you a specific focus! Attached here are the rubrics on which both pieces (the essay and the presentation) will be graded. There is also a rubric for the Oral Defense section of the task. Students will be asked two questions (sample questions here pages 54 and 55) and scored on their ability to answer. What happens when we’re done? The kids are hoping that the answer is NOTHING, but, unfortunately, we still have more to do! The week after our presentation filming will be spent preparing for the End of Course exam on May 7. For this 2.5 hour exam students will read and analyze a number of sources. They are ready for this; they’ve been doing it all year. After that exam, we will shift gears a little toward phase two of the AP Capstone program, AP Research. The pace will slow down and be much more relaxed, but we will start mining our curiosities and determining research focus areas for senior year. As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I’ve been so impressed by how well they are handling these large tasks, but sometimes you see something different at home. If you’re concerned about your student’s progress, please do not hesitate to reach out. Have a great weekend! Hello parents and guardians!
We are halfway through the Performance Task portion of the AP Seminar course. Last week students filmed their Team Multimedia Presentations and this week we will upload those presentation videos (and the Individual Research Reports that go with them) to the students’ Digital Portfolios for scoring by the College Board. I was very happy with all of the performances and I’m confident that they’re all doing very well thus far. Over the long weekend, students began reading the stimulus materials for the second, individual performance task. They will be generating research questions based on those materials, writing a 2000 word argumentative essay based on their research, and then filming a 6-8 minute individual presentation. They’ve done this before and I know they are ready; however, this is a task where I’m asking you to help me out! Spring gets busy and schedules get crazy very quickly. The independent nature of this project is an extra challenge for some students, so I’m hoping you can help me impress upon them the need to self monitor. Beyond the research, writing and presentation skills they will gain during this project, I think the ability to tackle a large independent project and manage their own timelines is perhaps even more important for their futures in college. I will do my best to gently nudge and not-so-gently nag if necessary, but I hope you can help as well. The more they talk about what they’re doing and share their progress, the more likely they are to avoid the dreaded all-nighters in April. Here are some important dates to keep in mind: March 11: Annotated Bibliographies due
Have a great evening! Hello, everyone!
I hope exam week is not too stressful in your homes. AP Seminar students have just completed a major chunk of their official AP coursework: the Individual Research Report. Per College Board Rules, I am not allowed to provide specific feedback on their drafts; however, after reading them all this weekend, I can say confidently that all of the students are well on their way to high quality papers to submit. Today in class students were given a summary of the notes I took while reading their papers this past weekend. I gave them a list of questions to consider as they do their final edits. If they will let you, it would be great if you could read those papers and discuss those questions with the students! I know some of them are very hesitant to share their work with their parents, but if they’re willing, I think you will enjoy reading their research thus far. Starting next week, we will shift into the group portion of this part of the assessment, the Team Multimedia Presentation. Students will be working with 2-3 other students to prepare an 8-10 minute presentation in which they will argue for a solution to a problem their team has identified. In past years, we have invited parents to come and critique those presentations prior to videotaping our official College Board submissions. Unfortunately, the students’ busy schedules are making that impossible this year! We will not be doing an evening practice session with parents invited this year. We are working on doing something similar during the day and asking teachers to give the students feedback instead of parents. When we get the day figured out, I will let you know the times. If you can sneak away from work or home and join us mid-day, we would love to have you! Going forward into next semester, you should start to see your students working on the big pieces of our College Board assessments. I will be putting many small check-in assignments in MiStar. These are my way of communicating to you about your student’s progress on those big assignments! If you start to see zeros popping up, it means we need to figure out some ways to help get your student back on track. For many, they are motivated by the high stakes nature of the assessments, but some struggle with the independence of tackling big projects. Roughly, you should see: Early February: Lots of work (perhaps with a group) on the Team Multimedia Presentation Late February/Early March: Independent research question development and lots of research Late March/Early April: Students will be writing their Independent Written Argument essays (about 2000 words).This is a big task and I hope you will ask them about their progress often! Late April: Lots of work on the Independent Multimedia Presentation (hopefully they will practice for you at home!) Hope you’re all staying warm! As always, please let me know if you have any questions. |
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