Student Generated Question and Answer

What do you do in June?

Here's my question, and I'll admit, it's a bit broad. However, with the weather reaching over 95 the past four days, it sure seems like June in my school, and not just with the weather. I do in-school suspension duty and the amount of kids in in-school has tripled since Friday. Furthermore, we've had three fights since Monday, which is the most since October, I think. For me, in the private world of my own classroom, the kids have been off-the-wall. I've even been in the computer lab, where it's air-conditioned, doing something fun and my 2 year old has more of an attention span than them. So the question becomes:

How do you keep the student motivation and interest and challenge as high in June as it is in October?

Sometimes there is nothing to be done; sometimes the school year just needs to end. (Sometimes?) But we need to continually offer the same high level of challenge and assessment throughout the year. But we need to also offer change...for example, right now I have over 25 pieces of writing in my students' portfolios. We have written on everything we have read and we have done a wide variety of different types of writing. I think it's safe to say that my students are burned out on writing, and that's OK...it was the price we paid for our goal of increasing the writing abilities and trying to step it up. But now, with the warm weather approaching and my favorite novel to teach on the horizon, I want to mix it up. We'll try a visual essay, where the students are going to take images from Flickr to prove their point from a list of topics. Instead of writing, they will be visualizing their thoughts. Hopefully this accomplishes the same as a formal essay and will continue to generate interest that will carry through to the end of the year.

This is also the time of year when music really helps as well. I usually use music throughout the year, whether it be something playing when the kids are working or as a method of timing the students..."when the song is over, time is up"...that kind of thing.

The bottom line is that we must continually change our approaches and methods if we want to reach every student. This certainly goes for our assessment as well...if we continue to revise and adjust our methods of assessment, then ideally our student output and interest rise and students leave our rooms feeling somewhat refreshed.