Giggles and group work

Question: What do you do if you can't help but giggle along with your students? Yesterday I was doing a lesson that encouraged my kids to come up with unique and even weird metaphors, which caused some people to turn the inappropriateness filter off. Mr. Leisen has this zen straight face that I can't quite pull off. Refocusing kids after giggle time has proven a real challenge, especially during sixth hour.

Today, the goal was to teach personification and introduce the kids to Critical Response, which is basically just a series of questions you can ask of any artistic work. We started with a photograph (for those of you who were at the Young Writers' Conference, it's the one of the man with balloons in Afghanistan) and had an interesting discussion each and every hour about it. I'm glad I did this lesson, because it not only warmed them up for talking about literature, but it showed me that the kids have interpretive skills that are pretty well developed. Their visual literacy is pretty good, but some of them struggle with the actual words on the page.

After the discussion of the photograph, I had the kids split into groups to ask the same questions of the poem "Traveling Through the Dark" by William Stafford. I gave each group a question about personification in an envelope so they wouldn't work on that question until they'd discussed their reaction to the poems a little. I found a lot of the same struggles with group work as I saw at Crosswinds--kids have a hard time focusing themselves. Most just filled in the questions on the worksheet silently without discussing them with their peers, which was the whole point of putting them in groups. I also handed off a group to Mr. Peterson, the Special Ed. teacher, during 2nd and 3rd hour but I felt I wasn't making the best use of his help.

By lunchtime I was feeling like I'd set up a really boring lesson, and worst of all, that the kids weren't really learning the lessons about personification and poetry analysis that I wanted them to. For sixth hour, I decided to change it up and do the critical response reading of the poem as well as the personification discussion as a large group. The kids nominated a student to read the poem aloud and I asked questions and called on kids just as I had with the photograph. They did MUCH better and I think they left with a greater understanding of the concepts BUT...I don't know, I just don't like doing such a teacher-centered lesson every day. It seems to be what they're used to, and they seemed much more into it during sixth hour, and I guess if there's more learning going on then that's the way I should do it. I don't know.

Tomorrow we're discussing sound elements and they'll have to prepare a choral reading in groups, so they'll have to work together. Hopefully that will be more fun for people since it's a performance activity, so we'll see. I'm also giving a quiz tomorrow, which should be a good test of whether I've taught these concepts in a way that will stick.