Just a little late-night readers theater!

Whew! There have been a couple late nights this week (tonight included) working on lessons, and (once again) it wasn't even a full week of school! Last night ended up being a late night because I ended up calling an audible on my 7th-grade plans for today. The 7th graders were going to have a quiz today, but following one of the review activities that we did, I felt like there were a few areas that they could use some more work with and they weren't quite ready for the quiz. So, rather than simply having the students look over their notes for another day and play another review game, I thought about how we could engage with the information in a way that we hadn't before. That's when my 3rd-grade brain kicked in a little--I'd have them do a readers theater! So, with my fingers furiously typing last night, I knocked out a short readers theater. We tried it out today; I wasn't completely sure how they would react to it (although I had a strong feeling about what some of them would think). I broke the students up into three groups of nine (I wrote it with 9 parts, and that worked well for my class of 27 students). I had them read through it in their groups a couple of times, and then we read it with the whole class. Everyone handled it better than I expected in the small groups, but they weren't excited about reading it with the whole class! Oh, well! It exposed them to the concepts in a new way, and I think that's the important thing! Now we will see how the quiz goes tomorrow! I'm attaching a link to the readers theater if anyone would like to take a look at it--I'm open to feedback!
Genetics Readers Theater

Well, I could go on, but I'm getting tired, and there's one more day of school to go!

Mindfulness thought for the week: Your perspective on something may change if you change the speed at which you look at it.

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