Who will you become?

We received news today. Ms. Scigliano, the other teacher for this class, is leaving us. We are happy for her new & exciting position & adventures in teaching! We are also sad because we will miss her.

We also  know that this will bring changes and disruption as a new teacher is found for the afternoons and a new routine is created.

This is a new challenge for our classroom but, as we have been discussing, we can control our response to the challenge.

Again, I ask you: Who do we want to be? What kind of class environment do we want to experience? We each control our actions and contributions. We add to the atmosphere. We create it.

It is in our power to experience AWESOMENESS!

You can part of the solution or part of the problem. You decide!

Here are two videos from Michael Jordan that relate to the power of choice and the transformative power of endurance and maintaining focus on a goal. It relates to sports. It relates to life. It relates to our class community.

BECOME LEGENDARY. CREATE GREATNESS THROUGH YOUR EVERYDAY CHOICES.

"I have something more important than courage. I have patience. I will become what I know I am"-Michael Jordan from "Look me in the eye".

We will be coming back to these brilliant videos at a later date to examine them from the perspective of media literacy.

Coming Up This Year in our Awesome Literacy Program...

I have been telling the students about some of the cool things I have planned for our class this year. I thought I would highlight them all here on the blog & tomorrow we will review all of them in more detail:

• 4 guest speakers (writers). These are real writers writing in the real world. Our first guest is Chris Simon, editor of the Innisfil Scope, who will be speaking in person about report writing & editorials (next Wednesday). The other interviews will take place via Skype as these writers call in from various part of the world. We will be speaking with a novelist, a reviewer (including video game reviews) and a poet.
• literacy & media collaboration projects with Gr. 9 & 10 students at Nantyr Secondary School
• Wii project with Nantyr Secondary School
• class youtube page & website(s) to showcase the wide variety of media/videos we will be creating
• Educator Partnership Program with shakespeareinbits.com. This is a software company in Ireland and we will be skyping with Fiona in December. We will be using their software in class in Jan/Feb as we study Romeo & Juliet and providing feedback about their software.

In addition to that, I will be incorporating all kinds of real world media representations to generate discusion, responses, writing, and to use as comparisons to texts. 

I hope you find this program as exciting as I do!