A Big Day

Today was a big day!

In writing we started filling out our heart maps (you can find these in our writer's notebooks).  The heart map is an idea generating technique.  Students think about people, places, or anything in their life that they truly care about and they put it on their list.  Later when students are looking for a writing idea they can look back to their heart map for something that might spark an idea.  We are going to continue to add to our heart map throughout this week and students are more than welcome to add some ideas while they are working at home.  I am hoping to try and take some pictures of heart maps and post them up here this week.

We also started to talk about claims.  Claims is something rather new in my classroom.  In fact it is what I wrote my research paper on last year while I was finishing my Master's at Miami.  Claim is the new trendy word for teaching logical arguments.  To me a claim is anything that you think that can be supported with evidence.  After we talked about claims and evidence students watched a video called the Fun Theory.

The students then discussed what Volkswagon was claiming in this advertisement and the evidence Volkswagon used to support their claim.  I love the video I hope you have time to watch it.

When the students were done with this we had them make their first claim of the year: Yes, I think going back to school is a good idea or no, I do not think going back to school is a good idea.  We are going to continue to work with this back to school claim this week and I will make sure to show you what we do.  

Claims will be a big part of our classroom this year and today was a nice introduction.

Tomorrow I will make sure to talk about the Conversation Calendars that we started today, like I said it was a big day.