Setting out on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail

This summer, Matthew and I set out on our first real vacation as a married couple.  This has been a rather hectic summer.  I am currently preparing for a semester of student teaching and we have been invited to 9 (count ’em) weddings this season.  Making the very most of these many celebrations, we planned a vacation around one of the weddings  and spent the entire last week of June in Louisville, Kentucky.

My husband is a bourbon enthusiast (-I believe anyone who has ever intentionally ordered a $35 glass of any beverage to be worthy of this title).  With that said, last Christmas, I wrapped two bottles of bourbon and placed them under the tree.  Upon opening them, I informed Matthew that the bottles came along with a  week-long vacation to the finest distilleries in  Kentucky.

We left Iowa Saturday afternoon for Chicago – the scenic route to Kentucky.  Once in Chicago, we met up with one of Matt’s childhood friends who graciously offered to host us for the night.  From there, we set out for Wrigley and my first Cubs game (yes, they lost).  From there, we ventured south, eventually reaching our destination late Sunday night.

For the majority of the week, we planted ourselves in the Highlands neighborhood – a suburb of sorts in southwest Louisville.  I found the small apartment we stayed in while browsing Airbnb – an absent-minded task I found quite therapeutic in the midst of studying for spring finals and writing term papers.  The apartment was located on the top floor of a Victorian home just within walking distance from the commercial (and well, let’s call it what is is – drinking) district.

During our week in the bluegrass state, we dined on anything from 4-star meals to KFC – all very convenient, considering the Highlands offers an assortment of venues for recreational eating and drinking.  On the first night, we decided to get classy – dining at Jack Fry’s -but of course, in very typical Matthew-and-Elsabeth fashion, shortly after dinner, we found ourselves meandering up Bardstown Road on a two-person bar crawl.  On the self-led tour, we found  a billiard saloon, The Holy Grale (a re-purposed church-turned-beer-tavern), and Big Bar, and finally ended the night stumbling through the backyard and up three flights of stairs to the front door of our apartment.

That Wednesday, we were determined to find a place where we could watch soccer (#Ibelievethatwewillwin), and quickly settled on Molly Malone’s. It didn’t take us long to make friends and enjoyed an afternoon of high-fiving strangers and chatting up one lone German fan.  From Molly’s, we caught a cab and made our way downtown to tour the Louisville Slugger museum.

The  following days were spent driving just east of Louisville to frequent bourbon distilleries.  First on the list: Buffalo Trace Distillery.  We loved the tour so much that we reserved a spot on the hard-hat tour the following afternoon.  On that tour, we heard a group of men marvel at how hands-on the experience had been at Buffalo Trace was compared to the other nine (!?) distilleries they had visited in Kentucky.  Later that afternoon, we traveled to the Woodford Reserve distillery and left all-the-more confident that we had visited the very best distillery first.  Way to go, Buffalo Trace!

On our last full day before the wedding, we visited Mammoth Cave – if you have an opportunity to visit the cave (and aren’t deathly afraid of confined spaces), reserve a place on the Introduction to Caving tour. Matthew and I didn’t get a chance to do this, but wound up feeling pretty envious of the people that did. Instead, we spent the whole day watching our step so as to avoid tripping over screaming children and exchanging eye rolls as we eavesdropped on people in our claustrophobically-large group.  All this, while an intimate group of adults just ahead of us suited up in spelunking gear to traverse through otherwise restricted areas of the cavern.  Oh well.  Something to think of for next time.

The week culminated with the celebration of two wonderful friends getting married in Owensboro. Congratulations, Jennifer and Nathan!  The day after the wedding, we headed home with lots of memories, three handles of bourbon (or some variant thereof), and an engraved “family bat” from the Louisville Slugger museum.  Thanks for a great week, Louisville.  We’ll be back to Kentucky someday soon.

 

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Romeo and Juliet, Act II

My driving motivation in designing these lessons was to deliver the material to students in a way that would be both meaningful and relevant.  I only faintly remember reading Romeo and Juliet my freshman year of high school.  After four years of undergraduate school (and an entire class on Shakespeare), I returned to the text with a profound appreciation for Shakespeare’s phrasing, his craftsmanship, and his style.

These are all qualities I never realized as a freshman in high school – and like any overachieving literary nerd, I tried to read the play with as much stamina as little freshman Elsabeth could muster.  Yet Shakespeare’s plots are timeless.  He captures the drama and tension of humanity in a way that will continue to be emulated for hundreds of years.  That is what I want to “stick” with my students.  If they leave the text with connections, I will feel as though I have done both them and Shakespeare a valid service.

For this unit, I placed students in groups of three or four for the entire unit.  This way, they can rely on each other to make sense of the text – and hold each other accountable for each worksheet, as well as the final project.  This way, no one feels singled out or pressured to understand the text independently.  It’s a group process – just as it is for the play production staging the play for an audience.

So, without further ado, I’ll recount my unit – lesson by lesson – in the hopes that you might have a thorough idea of what I was hoping to accomplish and why:

Day 1: Act 2 Scene I

Students know what happens after a party.  It’s where all the gossip and the peer-to-peer chiding take place.  I’d like students to consider this scene in that context.

Shakespeare uses puns and slang:

I wanted students to realize that what Shakespeare wrote at the time was relevant and hilarious.  He wrote for the masses – and the masses included people who find humor in dirty jokes.   Then I thought, what better way to demonstrate that than to address current puns in teenage slang (I can envision the eyes rolling now).

Day 2: Act 2 Scene 2

The balcony scene – and arguably, one of Shakespeare’s most popular scenes.  I wanted students to come with some vague sense of what the scene was about by googling it for homework the night before.

Because this is one of the most famous units, I felt a close reading would benefit students down the road (see What the Heck Does This Mean? handout).  I also wanted to students to relate to the interactions happening between Romeo and Juliet on a personal and current level.  That is why I also incorporated the OMG Romeo LOL handout.

Day 3: Act 2 Scene 3:

This unit is all about Friar Lawrence.  I wanted students to really connect with this character, because although he is not by any means as important as the male and female protagonists, he plays a vital role in the plot and is perceived many different ways based on each character’s distinct perspective.

I introduced movies clips in this scene so students can see how even movie adaptations of Romeo and Juliet cast completely different people for the role of Friar Lawrence – even though both productions use the same script.  Hopefully seeing visual representations of the character will help them think of these various perceptions while completing the Who is This Friar Lawrence Guy handout.

Day 4: Act 2 Scene 4 and 5:

I purposefully combined both scenes into one day because I wanted students to understand the nuances of the nurse.  Not only how interacts with Juliet, but how she also confronts Romeo’s friends.  In many ways, she is acting as the middle man and navigating the waters between both groups.

This happens a lot in the hallways of a high school.  Students pass notes, gossip, or get their friends to relay messages for one another.  This is why I think bringing in a modern-day example (Nita in West Side Story) would help students see the relevance in this character when they’re collaborating to complete the Who’s Your Nurse handout.

Day 5: Act 2 Scene 6:

I scoured Pinterest for a lot of the ideas and inspiration while creating these lessons – so it was only a matter of time before I came across the many Romeo-and-Juliet-themed weddings.  With all the hype surrounding Romeo and Juliet – and their love for one another.  I feel it is important for students to see how naïve and far-stretched many of these associations can be.  Shakespeare never even wrote a wedding scene for Romeo and Juliet!  -So no, you can’t recreate and invite all your friends.

This is why I wanted to give each group creative liberty to create their own wedding scene for Romeo and Juliet, keeping the circumstances of the story in mind as they complete the You’re Invited to the Most Controversial Wedding of the Season handout.

I loved designing these 5 days.   Enjoy.

Teaching Transitions

What a wonderful book to stumble across to teach transitions!

When planning for this unit, my primary goal was to demonstrate how transition words can vary depending on how an individual wishes to use them.  My hope was that by the end of the lesson, students could use the “transition tickets” to produce a paragraph in either narrative or essay form using four transition words from the groups we discussed in class.

The class I taught this lesson to was preparing to write class biographies.  I thought that transitions would assist students with introducing and providing background information on their interviewee, while also connecting their questions to the answers they were provided during the interview process.

I put a lot of work into devising the materials for this less. World Without Fish by Mark Kurlansky helped tremendously.  His book is filled to the brim with a variety of transition words that are both direct and easy to identify.  I also designed a handout so that students could refer to a prepared list of transition words while composing their biographies.

Transitions Lesson

Assessment: Technology and Transportation

ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT: TRANSPORTATION IN MADRID

This document outlines a series of three alternative assessments I would add to my culture unit on transportation in Madrid.  This overarching assessment will gauge the level of ability and comprehension students gained during the unit on transportation in Madrid.

Students will work in groups of two or three to complete the following assessments:

• one oral assessment
• two written/visual assessments

Each pair or group of students will be graded together using the rubric provided.  These assessment activities works to fulfill both interpretive and presentational communication standards by devising and recording their skits, while also allowing students to reflect on and implement specific products and practices of Spanish culture by learning Metro routes and watching Spanish commercials (ACTFL Standards 1.2 and 1.3, 2.1 and 2.2, respectfully).  The assessment also collaboratively meets ISTE NET Standards 1, 2, and 5 by allowing students to create and upload original documents; interact , collaborate and publish with their peers, while also exhibiting safe and responsible practices by using only protected accounts and trusted sites.

Using a Tumblr blog as a platform, students would perform and record a skit on flip videos or cell phones and upload it to my educational YouTube account (email address and password provided in the instruction outline).  Students would need to first create a Tumblr blog, assign the blog a domain name (their last names), and then if time, customize the site to enhance the look and feel of the site.  Each Tumblr site is password protected with a class-wide password, so only the students in classes and I can access the artifacts they upload for class.

The group’s first assignment is to script and perform a YouTube video, referencing a particular route on the metro.

The skit should:

• be no more than three minutes long
• include two verbs conjugated in the command form per person
•  reference one metro line change
• reference at least two metro stops
• mention one Madrid landmark
• incorporate commonly-used verbs associated with traveling on the metro (bajar en, subir en, cambiar linías, etc).

The skit should be grammatically sound and flow nicely.  After the skit is completed, each group will upload the assignment to their individual Tumblr blogs by first uploading their videos to my YouTube account.

After the video recording has been completed, students will use a free photo editing software (PicMonkey.com)  to map the directions they gave or received in the video; using an up-to-date electronic copy of the Madrid metro (they each received a copy of this map earlier in the unit).  After editing the metro map to show these directions, each group will upload the edited map to their Tumblr sites along with a written list of the directions they gave or received in bullet point form.

For this activity, points will be awarded based on whether each group:

• uploaded the map
• gave correct directions
• marked the map correctly
• used appropriate metro vocabulary
• successfully incorporated formal or informal commands in the written instructions.

Finally, students will design and upload an advertisement that they might find in the metro system.  First, each group will be required to watch three different television commercials that have aired in fairly recently in Spain.  Each of these commercials refers to the culture or city of Madrid, so their ads should also do this. Students will then be required to choose one of these commercials as a group and create at least one print ad for the company that they could imagine displayed in the metro stations throughout Madrid.

The completed anuncio(s) should meet the following requirements:

• two verbs in the command form
• be relevant to the people/culture of Madrid
• accompany or play off of one of the three commercials shown in class, and lastly
• be visually appealing to the masses.

To see these assessments in action, please feel free to visit my own Tumblr site.  I’ve also provided storyboards with screenshots below to convey a thorough step-by-step process to explain the procedure to students in my classroom.

INSTRUCTIONAL TUMBLR BLOG: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/msroushtransportation

PASSWORD: Teaching Second Languages

Enjoy!

Technology and Transportation

Spanish Transportation Unit

TRANSPORTATION IN MADRID

This transportation unit serves to familiarize students with the many forms of transportation available in Madrid, Spain. I thought this unit had considerable value considering our current location, and that many foreign language students throughout the state of Iowa are not familiar with urban culture and may be traveling abroad or to eventually to another city from a relatively rural community.

An overwhelming number of foreign language students in my area are on the college track, taking courses that will eventually qualify them for admission to colleges and universities throughout the state and country. It is my hope that this until will familiarize them with many methods of public transportation, while also exposing them to the cultural norms and facets of transportation available to the public in Spain’s capital city.

From what I have observed in high schools, travel is a hot topic. If students continue taking classes at the high school level, many programs will offer a senior trip to a foreign Spanish-speaking country. Of course, these trips are generally quite pricey, and a lot of the financial burden relies on the students. As a future Spanish teacher, I hope to one day have the opportunity to travel with my Spanish class to a number of different countries. I believe it will be my responsibility to expose students to what they would expect when traveling to that region, regarding routines and rituals widely and universally accepted bythat specific culture. By introducing students to the many forms of transportation, I hope to engage students by using technology to immerse them in the culture, and allow them to explore and discuss their observations.

The purpose of this unit is not only to give them a topic they are excited to learn about, but also to provide them a means to compare their own experiences with another cultural perspective. This unit can also be adapted to examine the modes of transportation for a variety of Spanish-speaking countries and give students an opportunity to consider what traveling or eventually living in that culture would be like: how would they use these modes of transportation and how would their perspectives change?

The lessons in this unit are listed in order below:

1. IN THE HOTEL. NOW WHAT?
2. ASKING AND GIVING DIRECTIONS
3. INTRODUCING: THE MADRID METRO
4. NAVIGATING THE MADRID METRO
5. GETTING AROUND ABOVE THE GROUND
6. DESIGN AN AD

And now a disclaimer of sorts: this unit is designed with the understanding that the students are already familiar certain vocabulary. Because this unit caters to a more advanced Spanish foreign language classroom, the students should already be acquainted with and tested over vocabulary pertaining to: pleasantries, colors and numbers, special prepositions, and vocabulary pertaining to travel and vacation. I have set these parameters after consulting the textbook my studentsare currently using (Blanco & Donley 2008).

Transportation Unit

ELL Lesson: September 11, 2001

Why Make a Lesson for ELLs on September 11, 2001?

Well, quite honestly, for a number of reasons:

First and foremost, we are entering an era where our students were very young or not even born when the planes struck the twin towers.   Although that day may remain vivid in our minds, our students will never comprehend the magnitude of that day unless they study it in a way that is both informative and tangible.

Secondly, the events of September 11, 2001 are a part of American history – and an important aspect of our culture.  As ELL instructors, it is our responsibility to not only advocate for these students, but also serve as understanding and knowledgeable ambassadors  of America and all it stands for.  By presenting reliable information in an organized manner, we can dispel myths and work to counteract stereotypes both inside and out of our classrooms.

Finally, after doing extensive research, I realized that the lesson plans founded by the 9/11 Memorial Foundation – although rich with information and creative resources – were also quite patriotic in nature.  Many ELLs come to our country with their parents, leaving behind distinct facets of their cultures, traditions, and routines.  With that said, I believe it is imperative for ELL students to understand the magnitude of these events on their own terms and from their own cultural perspectives in order for the events of that day to truly resonate on an individual and personal level.

Enjoy.

September 11, 2001 Unit

My Musings on Teaching

 

 

I guess I’ll start this blog by introducing myself.  So…’ello World Wide Web! -I’m Elsabeth Hepworth (see fancy title above) and I am currently a second-year MAT student (working toward my Master of Arts in Teaching) at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.  I decided to write this post because, quite frankly, I needed a place to share my thoughts and ideas.  Venturing into the world of education, I have so many frustrations, questions, observations and interests.  This is an ideal venue to showcase these queries – and hopefully a few of the triumphs, as well.

This idea came to me while I was surfing Pinterest and haphazardly repinning everything even remotely interesting to my teaching boards – I thought, perhaps I should return the favor.  Instead of hopping on the train of mindless re-pinning, why not contribute a little.

So without further ado, a little about this blog: over the past two years, I have been working toward a primary endorsement in Secondary English (in the state of Iowa, this means I will be qualified to teach grades 6-12).  I am also earning supplemental endorsements in Secondary Foreign Language (Spanish) and ESL (grades K-12).  I am a Simpson College graduate with bachelor’s degrees in English and Spanish.  During my undergraduate years at Simpson, I was fortunate enough to spend a semester studying in Seville, Spain.  In the past two years, I have logged over 400 hours in classrooms ranging from elementary ELL and after-school enrichment programs, to high school Spanish and Reading Strategies.

My hope is that this blog will serve a number of functions: first, it will serve as a place for me to voice my ideas, insight, and frustrations as they pertain to education and the teaching profession.  With that said, I want this site to also be a refuge – a place where I can go to share not only my bad days – but the projects, units, lessons, and experiences that make this job so rewarding.   My hope is that you feel the same way when you come to this site.  I feel truly honored to be entering a profession where I have colleagues and peers the world over.

So welcome to Mrs. Hepworth’s Musings on All Things Teaching.