Mentor Texts

Goodness Coming Your Way This Week! Link up below and check out other blogs to see what they're reading! To help build our community and support other bloggers, we ask that you comment on at least three other blogs before you. Also, if you tweet about your Monday post, don't forget to use #IMWAYR! Zen Pencils is a must-need resource! I love it for... so many reasons and here are a few: 1. Quotes turned into cartoons - These are short, visual pieces with so much to discuss. 2. Critical thinking - There are so many things to discuss in these texts. There's the person who said the quote and learning about them, there's looking at how the quote is brought to life in the cartoon. There's using visual literacy to analyze. So great. 3. Translations - Many of the comics are translated into different languages. I teach dual language so I love that there are options in Spanish but there are also translations in Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Polish, Russian, French, Portuguese, and Turkish. Students and I have been talking about activism and studying activists. This week we're also talking about failure. As we are finishing this trimester, I asked students to reflect on this school year, how they feel about themselves as learners, what goals they have for themselves for the rest of the school year, and what steps they need to take to achieve those goals. I gave students an option to share in Flipgrid or in a Google Form. Now we're creating learning mascots (I'll share more about this next week!) and we're discussing what it means to fail versus what it means to be a failure. We'll then go back to our goals and use our learning mascots and our deeper thinking about failure to move us into trimester three. To get myself prepared for this discussion, I did a one minute word association about perfection and then I did a two minute word association looking at the difference between what it means to fail versus to be a failure. I'll be sharing this with my students today and inviting them to think about these as well. ...Read More