Project- Week 2 Tommy

Today begins another day, another week in the excitement of education here at Eastlake Middle School. I would like to first talk about how I ended my day last friday and the extra work I completed this past weekend for my teacher. On Friday, I began to feel more comfortable in the classroom, being able to step up and do more with the students. Along with assisting students individually and in groups, I also had two projects to complete for my English teacher. I spent around two hours or so on the computer. My first task was to type up a Character Chart study packet for the 7th grade English students. The students are currently reading The Outsiders and my teacher wanted a way so that they could record and keep track of all the characters throughout the novel. The packet turned out to be five pages, with a total of ten character charts. One block is labeled "Physical Description" and the other "Personality Traits". The students have been directed to add information about the character as they learn new facts or descriptions. I have posted a picture of the front page to the above-right, I hope (all of the succeeding pages look familiar). The other project had to do with the 9th grade high ability English class. The class is currently learning about Shakespeare and will begin reading Romeo and Juliet very soon. In order to prepare them for this piece of art, we decided to give background on Shakespeare. My teacher always gives out a diagram of the Globe Theatre and verbally tells the class to label each section according to its name (such as Hell, the Tiring House, the Gallery, etc.). In order to make the activity easier to teach and better learned, I found the diagram online and then labelled each section using powerpoint. This way the labels can fall down into place as he talked about them. I also posted a picture of the diagram I created to the above-left, I once again hope. I also decided to spice things up a bit and found present day photos of the Globe Theatre. I included the photos in the presentation along with some research on the building and events that took place there. The research was mainly pictures of the time period that Romeo and Juliet began to show at the theater. I figured it would benefit the class if they could visualize what everything looked like as they read the play. I continued the "Shakespeare project" through the weekend. My teacher wanted to show a VHS tape called Shakespeare in the Classroom but did not know how to view it on his projector. I was luckily able to create a makeshift way of viewing it and came out successful. Off to class again :)