It worked!

Today was an exciting day at school. To begin with, we had an enthusiastic "game show" for the homecoming king and queen candidates. It is always fun when the whole school can come together for the sake of school spirit. However, the best part was that I got to use one of the strategies I learned during my Effective Instructional Strategies class this summer. The strategy was called concept attainment and I used it to teach my 9th graders sentence fragments. By the end of the lesson, my students knew all of the characteristics of complete sentences. I was even to walk my struggling students through the process with a little more guidance. What really made me happy was that I didn't feel like I was being boring. Usually I can't stand listening to myself when I am introducing a new grammar topic - but today wasn't anything like that! The students were involved with the lesson and figuring things out without me just telling it to them. Yay for today! It was a good day to end a week that started with a discipline referral. Hopefully I can keep the excitement going next week.