Sentence Starters

 Ugh.

I don't have much "gas left in the tank". 

(I don't have a picture of me running out of gas, but I think this screen shot of me, falling into a pitfall seed trap in my Animal Crossings New Leaf game, will suffice as a place holder for the sentiment.)

We've got six weeks left of school, and a few more tasks to complete (as well as two math units and a whole science unit to address). I'm happy to be "with" my students online, but I miss being "with" them in the flesh. It's hard to stay engaged, motivated, and energetic when you spend all your instructional time in front of a screen (as well as all your marking time and planning time).

It's not all doom and gloom. My students did a fantastic job presenting at last week's Unleash Digital Learning conference. Last week and the week before, I was involved with a team from the Ontario College of Teachers revising the Media Additional Qualification course guidelines (similar, but not quite, to what I did last year with the Teacher-Librarianship AQ courses). Just this past weekend, I enjoyed listening to Dr. Andrew B. Campbell give the second part of his OSLA-sponsored workshop on Becoming a Champion of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. But I've already reflected on those things and I don't know if I have anything more to say at this point right now on those topics.

As I was tidying up my little cave to get ready for teaching on Monday, my eyes fell upon a list. It's an important list to my students and it seems like such a little thing. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it in detail before, so here's a simple thing we do in our class.

All teachers have to do attendance. You can make every moment count in a classroom with tweaks to these every day requirements. My colleague, Farah Wadia, uses her attendance time to introduce a greeting from a different language. The students learn where the language is spoken, and replies back to the teacher as she models the use of the new word:

e.g. "Jambo, Diana" / "Jambo, Ms. Wadia".

In my class, the tradition that has evolved is for the students to select a "sentence starter". I begin the sentence, using the name of the person that needs to answer, and they complete the sentence in whatever way they want:

e.g. "Diana eats ..." / "Diana eats when she's bored"

These sentence starters serve multiple purposes. It...

• gives us insights into the person speaking (although you don't always have to answer truthfully)
• demonstrates that students know how to construct a sentence, with a subject and predicate, in a way that makes grammatical sense
• flexes our creativity muscles
• allows students to have voice and choice in the classroom

The person who comes up with the sentence starter is the first person to answer attendance in the morning, so that provides a bit of variety to our routine.

We've been doing this both in our in-person classes and online. The day we run out and then devote class time to brainstorming new ones is a highlight for some of the students. Others like to incorporate math into it by calculating how quickly we will go through the generated list. (We used sentence starters only in the morning while at in-person school, but we use them for morning and afternoon attendance while online.) It's okay to repeat some, and it generates murmurs of admiration when a new sentence starter is offered. The sentence starters have also branched out from simply verbs to adverbs (e.g. "Diana always ...") and possessives (e.g. "Diana's favourite ..."). Here are just a few of the lists I've found - with names blocked out. (We cross suggestions out after we've used them.)

I hope that this simple little routine will be remembered fondly by the students in my class. I know it'll put a smile on my face when I think about it after this year is through.