Celebrating the Holidays Dickens Style

This is my 4th year teaching 6th grade and one thing I've done every year around Christmas is my Dickens unit.  In the past, I've started out with having the kids read a variety of bios over Dickens life, and then we start reading A Christmas Carol together.  The first year I did this, I didn't have copies of all the books, nor did all my students have devices, so we just listened to the audible version.  This worked for some, but several students expressed needing to read the print to better comprehend the story.  Eventually, when our school became a 1 to 1 school, I was able to find online pdf versions of the book, which worked out for the most part, but anytime students have their devices, it's difficult to control the distractions that come with the technology.  This year, however, I was thrilled to finally have a classroom set of the book, thanks to a teacher group I'm part of on Facebook.  This year I feel like I've done the book justice.

This is a photo from my Bookstagram account on Instagram: booksnapps

The Victorian Era

I was worried that I wouldn't have as much time as I would've liked to devote to this unit this year.  I am also teaching Digital Citizenship, and I also only have 45 minutes per class.  Because of the time crunch, I didn't start out with my Dickens bios this time.  This year, I had the students put their "digital" skills to use and they did some research over the Victorian Era.  This is so important because the reader really needs to understand what was going on in this time period to understand the setting of a Christmas Carol.  The students learned all about London being the most populated city of the world at this time in history.  Also, they learned about what poverty looked like at this time and what work houses were and what prisons were like.  When we started reading the story, most students knew exactly what Scrooge meant with the following quotes: 

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides – excuse me – I don’t know that.”

When my students read and heard that part (from audible), they all looked at me like they couldn't believe what Scrooge said.  They knew that he basically felt that people in poverty were better off dead.  Had they not had a good understanding of the Victorian time period, that part would've gone right over their heads.

Image Source
Click on the following link for a great Victorian Era source: https://charlesdickenspage.com/charles_dickens_london.html

Bios

To incorporate more of my digital citizenship curriculum to this unit, I had the students create their own hyper-docs over Charles Dickens life.  This saved a ton of class time because they did the research on their own and also learned important aspects of Dickens life.  A hyper-doc is something new that I've tried this year and I absolutely love it.  It works well for one to one schools and also is perfect to use with Google Classroom.  What I do, is upload a simple template that I created on docs.  Usually it's just a two column table with three rows.  Within the directions I explain that the students need to find three credible sources over a specified topic.  They hyperlink the sites on the left side of the table and on the right side they briefly summarize the site that they linked.  This allows them to practice skills of searching and finding credible sources online and also helps them develop skills in writing summaries.  The template the students had on Google Classroom looked like this: Dickens Hyperdoc.  If you'd like to use this template, click on the link and make a copy for your own classroom use.  Here's an example of one of my students' work: Dickens Hyperdoc Student Work.  

Learning about Dickens' life in this way helped my students developed an understanding of his inspiration for A Christmas Carol.  My students learned that Dickens' father was arrested when he was 12.  He was thrown into debtor's prison because that's what happened back then when someone owed money and couldn't pay it off.  As a result of this, Dickens was forced to go to work at the age of 12 at a blacking factory.  This childhood trauma allowed him to develop a deep concern for the treatment and care of people living in poverty, which was the inspiration for most of his books.  

The Story

One reason why I love reading through "A Christmas Carol" every year is because most students have seen some kind of version of the story in a movie or a play.  Most are familiar with "Mickey's Christmas Carol," or "A Muppet Christmas Carol." 

Image Source

Since they have a basic understanding of the story, it provides an excellent opportunity to expose the students to classic literature.  Also it is a great way to challenge the kids to read and understand a story that's on the higher end of the lexile scale, which is 900 according to the website, https://fab.lexile.com/search/results?keyword=9780439101332.  Since I have reluctant and struggling readers in my classes, I have the students listen to an audible version of the story and read along in their books.  I love using an audible version when reading something together rather than the old, "Round Robin" reading style.  For this story, audible works very well because the reader in the version I've chosen has a British accent, so that helps set the tone and mood of the story.  As the students read, I printed off the following templates for them to fill out A Christmas Carol Visualizations.  I wanted to focus on the plot elements of the story, so I broke up the story into the following sections: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution.  I don't believe in busy work, especially when it comes to reading, (I can't think of a faster way to kill a person's love for reading than busy work) and also we are weeks away until Christmas break, so getting the students to do any thing that remotely seems like busy work is just not going to happen at this point in the year.  So, the students draw pictures to go along with the story.  I have them draw pictures of specific characters and setting (exposition), and give them specific scenes to draw.  I tell them if they have an artistic ability like mine, then it's perfectly fine to draw stick people.  I just have to get some kind of idea of what's going on.  I also told them that if they really don't want to draw then, they could write character traits for the characters and summarize what's going on in the scenes I want them to represent.  Using these templates opened up a lot of great discussions because we were able to use the templates to guide our discussions so that the students had a good idea of what to write or draw.  I also have blanks to fill in for each template...here's a key in case you aren't as familiar with the story: Key for A Christmas Carol Visualizations.

Wrapping up the Unit

This year, I found an excellent digital escape room over "A Christmas Carol." It was the first time I tried an escape room, and I'd say it was a success.  I actually was able to use this as a way to motivate the kids to be all caught up for me when it came to reading the story and getting their work finished on time.  This really was only an issue for students who were absent frequently to catch up on the reading on their own.  I told them that if they were behind, they'd have to use this time get all caught up instead of participate in the escape room.  There were only a few that didn't get to participate because the students were excited about the escape room all week.  All the students who participated were engaged the entire time. Unfortunately, since I only have 45 minute classes, not all the students escaped, but I gave them the option to escape at home and they could upload a screen shot to Google Classroom.  I didn't count the escape room as a grade, but awarded Class Dojo points to the students who escaped.  Here's a link to the product on Teacher's Pay Teachers.  I highly recommend it! A Christmas Carol Digital Escape Room.

All students are actively engaged and trying to beat the clock to escape!

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come made an appearance in the Escape room! This particular student wanted to dress the part for the Escape Room. 

This was my first student to escape in my first class of the day. 

I was able to keep the spirit of Christmas going with a Christmas Carol up until the last day of school.  I showed the movie, The Man who Invented Christmas, which was free this year for Amazon Prime users 👍.  This allowed me to have one more individual reading conference with each of my students for the 40 Book Challenge before Christmas break.  This movie has so many "Easter eggs" from "A Christmas Carol"  Also, there's several connections to Charles Dickens life that the students picked up from reading through some of his online bios.  It was neat for them to see the process of writing "A Christmas Carol" that Dickens went through.  The students learned from the movie that Dickens wrote the book in six weeks 😲.  This was totally unplanned, but we finished the movie on December 19th, which is the anniversary of the day that the book was published.  It was published 175 years ago this year.  I also scheduled an afternoon in our performing arts center for the entire 6th grade to watch Disney's 2009 version of A Christmas Carol.  This is my favorite movie version because I feel it's the most like the story out of all the movie versions I've seen.  This story was originally a ghost story, and this movie does this very well.   I can't watch this movie with my own children because it's too scary for them, but for 6th graders, they enjoy the spooky element in movies, so they loved this version as well. 

I was surprised that I was able to keep doing A Christmas Carol activities up until the very last day of school.  The day before the last day of school, I assigned students roles from the story and they made social media posts in character using a Padlet site I created. They had a ton of fun with this, and they were able to put their dig cit skills to use through this activity.  On the very last day, the students pretended that they were at Fred's Christmas dinner and they played a few rounds of the game "Yes and No."  I had other games like charades and "How, When, and Where," ready in case they became bored with "Yes and No," but the engagement lasted until the bell rang.  I actually had to promise them that we'd play the game another time so that they'd go on to their next classes.  

Having fun playing the game, Yes and No

My Takeaway

This is a unit I hope to do with my students for years to come.  It's become a big part of my holiday tradition that I hope I can continue for as long as I'm teaching.  With teaching several classes, I've probably read through this story a total of 15 times, and it never gets old.  The lessons readers can learn from "A Christmas Carol" apply very much today as they did 175 years ago.  It's very difficult to keep the students engaged during this time of year in school because they are so excited about the holidays, but this unit allows me to keep the learning going up until the very last bell rings before Winter break.  

Google Certified (Level 1)

I've been using Google features from G Suite for a few years now.  My school's tech director graciously gave us some professional development over Google Drive, Google Forms, Docs, and Google Classroom.  That changed my life as a teacher.  Since I use these products so much, I decided to see if I knew enough to become a level 1 Google Certified educator.

Why I love Google

I am not an organized person.  I never have been.  As a kid, the clean desk fairy never visited my desk.  My locker in middle school and high school was always a disaster.  As a teacher, it's a struggle for my desk to not look like a tornado hit it.  In my first few years as a teacher, I moved classrooms and grade levels every year.  I didn't know which lessons or resources to keep because I almost knew that I'd be moving my classroom in May and would probably never use the resources again.  I would save some things in a good old file cabinet just because I really didn't know if I would need the resources again or not.  When I was introduced to G-Suite, it was an educational miracle.  No longer did I have to rely on paper resources.  I could save all of my resources to Google Drive.  If I moved at the end of the year, no harm, no foul.  

When I started using Google Classroom, that made things even better.  I didn't have to spend hours at school planning and grading papers.  I could do all of that from my chromebook at home.  Google Forms was also a game changer for me because I can set the forms up as quizzes and Google grades it for me!  That saves me hours and hours of time, which means more time for my family at the end of the day.  Now, I do grade essay type questions on Google forms myself, but the fact that it grades most of it is huge.  

Why I decided to pursue the Google Cert

I didn't know a Google Certification was even a thing for teachers until I learned about it on a podcast I listened to over the summer.  After I heard about it, I wondered if that's something I could do.  I decided to look into it more and found that Google had its own training center and it's completely free! Refer to the link here: Google Training Center. There are different levels of the certification, and I chose to just see if I could pass the Level 1 Certification.  To take the Level 1 Certification was only $10, so if I failed the exam, I lost $10, which is not a big deal.  

Training

The training modules were very organized and user friendly.  If you sign in with your Google account information, it will check off the modules as you complete them.  It made me feel oh so accomplished when I saw the check marks.

Check out the checkmarks!  Pay no attention to my endless number of tabs.

For each module, there was usually a section of texts to read through, a you tube video, and audio recordings.  At the end of each module, there were questions to answer which were usually multiple choice and check box type questions.  After answering the questions, I immediately could check my answers.  This was very helpful because if I got any wrong, I could go back and review what I apparently didn't understand.  I was able to go back and review any of the modules at anytime.  

Registering for the Exam

I had some issues with registering.  When I was going through the training modules, I used my school account information.  When I first attempted to register, I also used my school account information.  It turned out, I couldn't create a test account with my school information.  I had no idea what was going on, so I tried to call the test company.  They had no idea what was going on either.  They gave me a Google site to access and told me to reach out to Google.  As it turns out, Google doesn't want to be called.  I tried to find some contact information, but couldn't access a phone number because I don't have administrative rights at my school.  I called the testing site back, and they told me that Google has their certifications on hold, which was not accurate at all.  I finally reached out to a Google Educator Group which I learned about through the training program.  This was the best and most helpful thing for me to do.  Someone from the group told me to try my personal Google email to register.  I tried that and it worked.  I later told my husband about this experience.  He is an IT guy, so he thought that maybe Google wants people to register with their personal gmail account so the certification can stay with them even if they transfer schools.  This made sense to me, but I am not sure if that is the case or not.  

The Exam

Once I registered successfully for the exam I received an email saying that it could take anywhere from 24-48 hours for me to receive my log in information to take the test.  It only took about 15 minutes, however, and I was ready to take it.  I had 7 days before the information expired, so I wanted to go ahead and take it that day.  I took my boys to my mother in law's house and drove to my favorite coffee shop, so I could be kid and distraction free.  Once I logged in, the testing site accessed my web cam and gave me a 2 and half hour time limit.  I didn't think I'd need near that much time, but I was wrong.  The test is divided into two parts.  The first part was multiple choice, check boxes, and matching. It wasn't too bad, and I really liked that on the check box questions, the test specified how many to choose.  Some I felt were really common sense type questions and were fairly easy for anyone who has used any of Google's features, and apps.  I had about 2 hours left when I was finished with the first part, and was feeling pretty good about myself.  Once I accessed the second part of the test, I realized that I really had to know what I was doing.  The second part was all application.  The test gave me different tasks to complete using a Google account linked to my testing account.  When I finished, I had about 20 minutes to spare.  Once I submitted the exam, I waited about 5 minutes, and then I was sent information on my personal Gmail account on how to access my results.  

I passed!  

That's right, I passed!  I loved the fireworks from the image I accessed.  The message said to wait about 24-48 hours to receive my badge and certificate, but they were sent to my email in about an hour.  Now I have about 14 hours of professional development to add to next school year.  The training didn't seem like 12 hours, but that's how long it says that it took.  It probably didn't seem long because I was able to go through the training at my own pace instead of 12 solid hours.  

Advice

Before taking the exam, go through the Google Training Center modules and take the quizzes they provide.  Also, apply what you learned as you learn it.  For instance, when you learn about some of the features you can use in Gmail, go and try them out.  This will help big time when preparing for the application part of the exam.  When you are ready to take the exam, make sure you are able to devote about 2 and half hours of uninterrupted time.  If you are like me with kids at home, do not take the test with your children around.  You definitely want to have about 3 hours of childcare available.  When going through the training modules, my kids were with me and interrupting me, but I was not on a time limit.  With the test, you don't have unlimited time.  Also, you want to take the test in a place where you won't be distracted.  I chose to go to a coffee shop because I didn't want to be distracted by all the things I needed to do at home.  This worked out well for the most part, but I did see someone I knew and I felt like I was rude when I told her that I was taking an exam.   She was very gracious and understood completely, but I'm not sure if this would be the case with everyone.  

To me it was totally worth going through the training and taking the exam.  I learned so much from the training itself that I will be applying to next school year.  So, even for those who don't pass the test, or don't want to to take the exam, the training is definitely worth your time especially if you have access to the G-Suite at your school.  

Room Transformations (Wild Card Style)

So, upon my principal's recommendation, I recently read Hope and Wade King's book, The Wild Card.  The King's are a married couple who teach at the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta Georgia.  When I visited RCA in March of 2017 I got to see both of them teach in person, which was nothing short of amazing.  They both are very gifted teachers and they share their passion for teaching in their book.  There are so many take aways I gained from this book, but I decided to try one new idea since it was so close to the end of the school year.  I did my own room transformations with the themes of Disney and Star Wars.

Disney

My classroom main theme is Harry Potter, so the challenge for the room transformation was to cover up all my Harry Potter decor as much as possible.  I bought plastic tablecloths from the dollar store to  go over my Harry Potter wall decals.  I also brought some of my boys' Mickey Mouse stuffed animals and our family pictures from Disney World.

One wall of my Disney Room Transformation including Disney quotes and Family pictures from Disney World.

I also had plastic table cloths covering the desks which I had formed into groups as well as baskets at each table for different planned group activities.

Seeing the look on the kids' faces when they first saw the room transformation was priceless.  It was what made all the extra work worth it.  They seemed excited to be in my room that entire week and wanted to know what "Disney" activity we were going to do each day.  Usually, this type of enthusiasm doesn't happen in late April and early May, so I was impressed.

I had a Disney themed plan for four days.  This could've been extended to five days, but we had to finish up standardized testing on that Monday.  Since I have 45 minute class periods, that worked out well.  On Tuesday, we did a close read on a short Bio of Walt Disney.  They also watched Steam Boat Willie and did a close read on a Steam Boat Willie article I found from the Library of Congress.  I declared that the following day, Wednesday was Disney Princess Day and the core of my lesson was Snow White.  Since Snow White was the first full length animated Disney movie, we did a close read of the original (Brother's Grimm) version of Snow White.  That lesson could've easily been extended to a few days with how much we could've done...we could've researched the different cultural versions of Snow White and even read other original versions of Disney inspired movies.  Even though most of my students are 12, they loved this lesson...boys included.  Thursday's lesson involved planning a trip to Disney World using online resources.   This lesson could've easily been extended to two days since no one was anywhere close to completion by the end of class.  My final lesson was having the students watch the Disney short film, Feast, analyze the plot of the film, and then tell the story from "Winston's" point of view.

My Disney Princess corner.  I couldn't cover up all my Harry Potter decor, but that's alright. 

Star Wars

The following week, I transformed my room to a Star Wars theme.  The transformation process was very similar to the Disney theme the week before.  I used tabled cloths, pictures I printed online as well family pictures from the Star Wars part of Disney World.  One difference is that one of my students had a ton of Star Wars merchandise that he shared that week with me.  He also stayed after school to help me decorate my room.  I was thrilled that I was able to involve him in this way because he was able to take ownership in what he learned that week.  

May the 4th Be With You!

This theme lasted longer than I expected.  The first day, I had the students read an article over the Star Wars film history.  This lesson worked out well because students didn't have to watch the films to understand the activity.  In another lesson, I broke the students into ability groups and gave each group a character bio.  Again, even if the students hadn't seen the movies, they could easily understand and participate with the activity.  They read the bio and identified character traits with their particular character.  The next activity was a lot of fun, but I should've allowed a few more days, but there just wasn't time.  I brought in my boys' Star Wars figures and old calendars.  I put the students in groups again and had them do photo shoots of the figures.  They used the old calendar pictures for the background.  After they finished the pictures, they used https://bookcreator.com to write a story to go with the pictures.  The kids loved this activity.  I gave them two class periods to work, but most didn't finish.  

I purposely planned my Star Wars theme week to fall into the week of May the 4th.  For that day, I dressed as Princess Leia and encouraged other students to dress up as a Star Wars character of their choice.  Some of the Star Wars fans got into it.  On that day, I had the students analyze Star Wars websites using the 5 W's to determine if the information was legit.  The students learned that the Star Wars franchise may very well outlive us all.  

The following week, I allowed a few more class periods to show episode IV which was the first Star Wars movie ever made.  I was able to connect several standards with he movie such as making inferences, plot structure, and character traits.  I also had the students write up a movie review after they watched the movie.  I was able to convert several of my students into Star Wars fans! 

The Challenges

It was difficult to keep the table cloths on the walls the entire week.  My room is quite humid, so in the warmer months of the year, it's nearly impossible to get anything to stay on the walls without my glue gun.  Every morning, I would have to restick things to the wall, and after so much of that, it kind of lost it's magic.  Also, the students destroyed the table cloths on the desks, so I decided I wasn't going to use them again for that kind of room transformation. They seemed to be more of a distraction anyway.   I will be looking for ideas for next time to help me keep things from falling from the walls.  I got some ideas from other teachers to use Command Strip hooks to hang fabric or table cloths from the walls.  I plan on trying that next time.  

The Pros

This really helped get my students back into learning mode since most of them had mentally checked out after spring break.  They were excited to come to my class every day during my transformations and all of them were engaged in the activities...even my students who were the hardest to motivate.  This is not something I can do all the time because it does takes a lot of time and effort to get my room "transformed."  Plus, doing something like this often would not be as magical.  It is definitely worth the time and effort, but looking forward, it is something I will probably save for the end of a term when students need a little extra motivation.  

I totally recomend reading the book, The Wild Card.  Teachers will definitely get some much-needed inspiration for their own classrooms.  The Kings are definitely teachers to look up to. 

Wild Card