Collaboration

I have been working with an 8th grade L. Arts teacher in our building, Mrs. Gunn, for this project. I was her mentor 2 years ago, and she did the poetry explication as part of her portfolio. She has shared her lessons with me, but I have added the student practice, revised the vocabulary handout, created additional handouts, and added assignment options, plus the requirement of an oral presentation.

This will be the first year for the 6th grade poetry unit. It was recently developed with my guidance by my student teacher, Miss Parton, who will be teaching it. Mrs. Haas, the other 6th grade L. Arts teacher, will also implement the unit. Poetry explication was not originally part of the lesson plans, so I have added that component.

Collaboration with our librarian, Mrs.Keck, might include pulling poetry books from our collection as well as books from the public library, creating a pathfinder of poetry websites, and helping students identify poems that are appropriate for the assignment. Ideally, I'd like to have a list of poems or poets for the students (both 6th and 8th grade) to choose from, but that would take a lot of prep. Possibly this is something she could tackle as well. In addition, she could compile a list of image websites, such as Flickr (from Yahoo) for the students to access for their presentations.

Collaboraton will also occur with Mr.Lengrich,our Technolgy Director. We will rely on him to give mini-lessons to the 8th graders on Wiki construction and video and music downloading and editing and to assist in the classroom as needed as students are working on their projects. Our 6th graders have had experience with PowerPoint and Publisher, so we will probably only need Mr. Lengrich occassionally to troubleshoot any issues.