I’ve been in a paragraph beehive of my own during the past two weeks. I’ve waited it out with crashers who wanted to get into my classes, said no to the ones who thought they could just waltz right into my classes without attending the first day, and expelled the no shows. Also, I’ve been back to the grind of preparing lessons on the paragraph and other writing skills-related topics (along with turning in this form or that), which brings me to the bees.
In reinforcing some of the basic ideas taught last week on the paragraph, I decided to use the quirky analogy of a beehive. It may not be scientifically accurate, but I figured comparing the topic sentence to the queen bee, the supporting ideas to the drones, and the details to the worker bees would be a way these concepts would stick in my students’s minds. Or, somehow the 15 year old Shindo who wrote short stories about the facts about plants while his biology teacher lectured about them was channeled.
I’ve also prepared a handout where I characterized all the punctuation symbols as a family and the Semicolon is the daughter of the Period and the Comma. Last spring, I had an impromptu teaching moment where I drew all the punctuation marks as a family portrait on the whiteboard and I told the class that the Semicolon was was the love-child of the Period and the Comma. This time, however, I wasn’t as colorful with how I described her in the more organized version of that presentation.
If I were more organized with all the sections of this class I have taught in past semesters, I wouldn’t have to spend as much time working on all these hand-outs and lessons. But, I am always looking for new ways to present all the necessary things they need to know to become competent writers and there are things I haven’t covered in the past. I’m also trying to improve on things I’ve done before.
I created some wonderful PowerPoint presentations to go along with the Paragraph Beehive and the Punctuation Family. That was the easy part. Dealing with the Smart Cart so that I could show them was the challenge. I set my MacBook up to the monitor cable so I could project the presentations on the screen. Logically, pressing the Laptop button in the Display Sources group would do, but it took me a few minutes to figure out the Document Projector Button was it, mainly for the cable I hooked up to my laptop. In the scamble to find a solution after the Laptop display wasn’t projected on the screen, I saved my presentations on my flash drive and then tried to unlock the Smart Cart to access the PC to no avail. The combination the Media Technology office wrote down for me did not work. After the class witnessed my comedy of errors, I guessed on pressing the Document Projector Button and it worked. Only I had to deal with all those glitches.
School’s had so much of my attention that I haven’t done Facebook or Twitter that much this week. One morning, I left my computer on with my Facebook profile online and a friend of mine tried chatting me up until she realized I wasn’t there. Sorry about that.
Maybe I’ll give the bees the paragraphs I’m grading this weekend so they can make a beehive. The bees are worth saving for sure.
Tags: Bees, educational technology, grammar, paragraph, punctuation, teaching moments
