Talent borrows; genius steals.  This reading technique, “Exploding Sentences,” was stolen from the much missed Ms. Wilson (late of Cap Hill; lately of lucky, lucky University Heights), who learned it, I believe, from Faye Brownlie, from whom most/all great ideas about language instruction come.

Take a sentence (or in our case, a paragraph – it is MACC after all) (whatever that means) (ahem *Mental Asylum for Corrupted Children” ahem), then use your red pen/pencil crayon to explore the author’s use of language: what you you notice about word choice?  Sentence structure?  Paragraph structure?  Use of figurative language?  Use of punctuation?  Why do you think the author made those choices?  What impact do you think they wanted to have on the reader?

Then get out your blue pen: what questions can you ask of the text?  What do you want to know more about?

Finally green: can you use known information to try to answer some of the your questions?  Can you make predictions?

In December we finished reading Book One, The Golden Compass, of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (fasten your seat belts for Book Two, The Subtle Knife!).  This is my third time reading this book out loud with a class, and each time I appreciate it more and more.  It doesn’t get any better.  The energy in the room is on fire. 100% engagement.

Before reading each chapter, we would “explode” one of that chapter’s paragraphs, first privately/individually, then going hive-mind to collect our ideas on the board and deepen our understanding by teaching each other.

Two things I’ve noticed:

1. Take a look at how deeper our thinking got over the course of only two months.
2. A funny coincidence (or not) is that at the same time we were doing this work, focused on reading, everyone’s writing has been growing by leaps and bounds too.  Funny how that works…

 

 

 

 

 

Our Word of the Year for this annus horribilus (although, to tell you the truth, in Room 105 it has been kind of an annus mirabilus so far) has been equanimity.

Starting around a thousand years ago, way back in September, we looked at some dictionary definitions of the word (Dictionary Wars!) and the Latin roots, and then set about exploring its meaning in many different contexts: Bruce Lee, Wu Mei and Wing Chun, the Hubble Telescope, the incredible Lynda Barry, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal, Brené Brown, Leon Fleisher, and, with greater and greater frequency, Jeff Warren, Dr. James Maskalyk, and the Consciousness Explorers Club (we’re even made our own CEC, Jr.!).

In October (or was it November? who knows–with the combo of Daylight Saving Time and the current health restrictions, every day is kind of like the last, and it’s not just due to the number of times we play Giant 6-Square each week…) we made webs of the learning–or of the learning so far.

Criteria:

• Hierarchy of size
• Use of special features to increase clarity of communication
• Personalization of content
• Thoroughness in content
• Using the fewest possible words to capture the essence of ideas
• Finding connections across the web

Here are the results!

Full-size:

 

Close-ups:

 

Now stop looking at this and go do nothing.