clair055

Christmas Day I sat in a very full movie theater and experienced a crowd so moved by what they had watched they cheered and clapped at the end of the movie.    It’s such a rare occurrence.   I think I can count on one hand the times in my life where I’ve witnessed clapping after a movie, but the particular movie I saw deserved it.  I just have to wonder how many of those people realized they enjoyed a story that was originally published as juvenile fiction. Yes!   The movie War Horse was originally published as a book for young adults in 1982 by Michael Morpungo. The movie could be summed up by five words – a boy and his horse – but it’s so much more than that.   While the main storyline involves a very special horse and a young man who owns him there are other story lines as well involving duty, responsibility, patriotism, etc.  Morpungo expertly weaves a tale about the horse and various people he meets before and during the course of W...

What you see here is a little booklet a group of students created in my classroom once we completed our study of World War I. It’s very simple…just a ring binder and unlined index cards. The activity begins by asking groups of students to review the notes in their notebook. Working with group members they should create a series of factual statements tracing the events of World War I. Statements should be fairly simple and straightforward. The number of statements created should correspond to the number of students in the classroom. For this particular activity we needed 18 statements. Class size determines how many statements should be assigned. Now…..before you tell me how lucky I am that in this particular group I only had 18 students let me remind you that the actual class size was larger, but a few of my special needs students had been pulled out for the review and were working with the special needs teacher. Usually this activity would require 24 or 25 statements. Once students wo...