Freshman and Senior English Work on 21st Century Skills
Two of the goals for David City Public Schools are to increase student engagement (involvement) in the classroom and to advance 21st century skills through collaboration and the integration of technology. One section of senior English and all of the Freshman English students have recently been working toward those goals through class projects and presentations.
In the senior Reading for Life class, students had finished reading Tears of a Tiger, a hard-hitting novel about teenage drinking and driving. After reading and discussing the book, students were assigned to create a poster which advertises the novel to potential readers. The poster had to include various items such as the novel's theme, pictures and graphics of symbols important to the story, character interpretations, and a recommendation. Much of what they created was done on the computer through access to the internet or Microsoft Publisher. Then these items were transferred to a poster for presentation. (See the slideshow for a glimpse of the students hard at work.)
In freshman English, the students had been studying nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs. As part of a review in preparation for the test, students were divided into groups, with each group assigned to one of the parts of speech studied. Then they had to create a review session that would be presented to the rest of the class. We had some colorful posters, computer-generated games and puzzles, a skit, and other creative ideas for presenting the information. A special hit was the "Helping Verb Rap" done by the group made up of Lee S., Mollee H., and Aubrey E. (Check out the slide show to see some of the freshmen in the planning stages of their presentations.) Even though the projects were successful, it would be even better if each student had a laptop of his or her own to use. Hopefully, that will be a reality in the near future.
