Class Brainstorm
Your story can be far-fetched, but it has to be believable.
The story should make you think by having a theme or moral.
Your story should be organized in some way.
Comedy stories have different rules.
Making up names can be difficult.
Actually completing the story can be hard.
Knowing when to stop can be hard too.
It’s important to avoid rambling and going off on tangets too much.
Don’t make everyone die.
Class Brainstorm
You can just throw stuff on the page. It can be “mind-vomit.”
You can get carried away with unreal or unrelated things.
Your characters and story can be anything.
Today you are going to think up three or more technologies that will exist in the future section of your story.
1. Communication: How will the people of the future communicate? Imagine a device or implant that could exist in the future. Write two paragraphs. One to describe the device in detail and a second to explain how it works.
2. Entertainment: How will the people of the future be entertained? Write two paragraphs. One to describe the device, implant, or whatever you can think of that would entertain people in detail and a second paragraph to explain how it works.
3. Transportation: How will the people of the future get around? Write two paragraphs. One to describe the transportation device or vehicle and a second paragraph to describe how it works.
The goal here is to help students brainstorm the future for their future story.
Write a story in which a character you make up goes into the future, does something and returns. Minimum 5 pages typed, double spaced, and in 12 point font.
Assignment 1 Homework: Make a list of 10 or more steps to go through to complete a story. Post your list to the blog in the comment section below. Due Thursday, March 23rd.
Assignment 2 Classwork: Write your steps out in your planner to complete your final final draft on Thursday, April 6th.
Workshops: Over the next week, we’ll be doing workshops to write, develop, and improve different components of your story.
Grading: You will be graded on the quality of your story and get participation grades for the workshops.
Blogging For Teachers: My Presentation For The Seattle Middle School Conference. Note: this presentation movie has to fully load before you can watch it and it may take a minute.
Room 132 is the collaborative blog. Mr. Pettis and his students contribute writing and video to make this a place where the results of learning and creativity are shared.
640×480 version
The title says it all.
640×480 version What does the generation of tomorrow predict the future will be like? Watch this video to find out. I’m really proud of this video and the music and my visionary students! More comments over on Mr. Pettis’ personal blog, I Make Things.
In this video I teach you how to make a Magic Monkey Bob finger puppet. You need felt, needle and thread, googly eyes and a pair of fabric cutting scissors! Watch the video and then go make your own finger puppets!
Update: The thing that I didn’t mention in my video is the main goal I have behind teaching students how to make fingerpuppets. The main goal is to show that you can plan something out and then make it. By planning something out, you are teaching yourself how to make something which I think is pretty darn cool.
Should people in jail have rights? Well, the U.S. troops in charge of prisoners at Abu Ghraib did not think so.
“Your going to want to die but guess what I’m not going to let you!” said a U.S. troop. They were telling them this because they were about to torture these prisoners to the point where they would be begging to die.
“They are treating us like women: they tell us they want us to suffer like the women do,” said a prisoner of the jail Abu Ghraib. This is just the start if all the awful crimes committed not so long ago by our own U.S. troops. The troops would beat the prisoners to the ground, cover their heads and make the prisoners take all their clothes off. Then the troops took pictures and posted them on the web to humiliate them and publish it to the world.
Everything they did was awful but in a way I can’t blame them. Being in a war has to be the hardest thing ever and having the chance of revenge is all they could crave for what those people had done to our country. The only problem was they were getting revenge on the wrong people. Those people they tortured were not the ones who planed and flew those two planes in to the twin towers; they were in jail for other crimes.
Those people had all the human rights just like anyone else who may have not one thing on there criminal record. The soldiers had no right to commit the crime they did and then publicize it to the world, but it was their choice. What they did put a bad look on the U.S. for a while but people in the world also need to realize that is not haw all Americans are.
Although these crimes of torture were wrong in so many ways, if you were a woman and knew other women were being treated badly, what would you do to the men who were torturing them? There are a lot of sides to this issue and so many things to think about but overall what they did was wrong even with all the other factors.