Let's write an acrostic poem

Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

April is the last month of our project and before putting an end to it, we decided to make a joint product. We thought about an activity which can be creative enough to make our students excited. So, writing an acrostic poem including both the letters of our project, "Time Travel in Literature" and the whole story of Great Expectations. 

My students wrote the last 4 lines/letters of the project, which include the ending of Great Expectations. They got together and made meaningful lines which also rhymed. They sometimes used dictionary to find the proper words, and sometimes they used me. :)

They proved that they can also become creative poets as well as successful writers.

Process of writing the poem

The whole poem as a joint work

We used web 2.0 tool Meeting Words while we were combining our poem together.

How my students wrote their endings...

Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

My students did really a good job to rewrite the ending of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. They were newly learning some basic grammar structures in English and this activty was a serious opportunity to use those structures for my students.

On the other hand, they needed to be creative enough to make up a new ending for the book. Who knows, maybe this was the first step of their writing career...

And as far as I see, they managed to bond their dream ending to the novel successfully. I'm proud of them.

My students while they're writing their endings

I wrote a note for my students too...

Happy World Book Day!

 Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

23rd of April is the World Book Day. It is also Children's Day in our country, what a nice coincidence! We printed our new collaborative product e-books "What if I were Charles Dickens..." delivered to our students and made them happy with their own books in both World Book Day and Children's Day.

My students are very happy and proud to accomplish such a tough job. And I am proud of them too. I hope this activity, this project expands their horizons about English, about literature and writing. Well done kids!

Our printed e-books

 

Cover Designs for E-book

Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

As April activity we formed an e-book which includes our students' own endings for Great Expectations. We also asked the volunteer students to design a book cover. 

You can see my volunteer designer students Elifnur, Minel, Seher and their cover designs below:

Our e-book, "What if I were Charles Dickens" is published

In March our students read the worldwide classic Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. After they finished the novel at the end of the March, they started to think about the ending of the book. Because one of their most important task is to write their own ending for the book in April.

 The aim of this activity is to motivate students to improve their use of English language through reading a worldwide classic.

 And also we aim at encouraging the students to write in English, developing their imagination and creativity.

All of our students were responsible for the same task: creating an end of their own for Great Expectations. After they sent us their endings, we gathered them in one place and created an e-book as a collaborative product.

Some volunteer students designed covers for the e-book by using web 2.0 tool Canva. We took a poll to choose the best cover with Google Forms. Finally we formed the e-book on Flipsnack.

Now, the main activity of April, our e-book is ready for everybody to read what came out of the fresh and limitless minds of our students:

                         

     What if I were Charles Dickens e-book

Summary of March

 Alev Çalımbay Atakul/50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

March is the reading month for us. We read and finished "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens. My students loved it a lot. Before we started reading I was anxious about their probablity of disliking the story. But they internalized the story so deeply that, they even discussed about the most beloved character of the novel, the most exciting chapter etc. They all had many ideas about the development of the characters and our protagnist Pip's bumpy life.

They felt sorry about Miss Havisham but also they felt angry at her behaviours to Pip and Estella's relationship. Most of my students' favourite character was Joe, because of his endless kindness to Pip.

After we finished reading, we watched the movie adaptation of the novel as well. It was a very successful adaptation. Students liked it a lot and watched it carefully in order not to miss any scenes.

You can see the summary of our March activities in the video below:

Finally, We Read Great Expectations

Alev Çalımbay Atakul/50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

March is the month that we finally started reading the marvellous novel "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens as we mentioned before.

My students were really excited to read an English novel in its native language as they have little chance to do it because of their level. But throughout this project, they improved themselves a lot. Now, they have the confidence to understand a novel that simlified to their level. And this enthusiasm makes me really happy.

In this month we came together from time to time in order to analyze the story. Students helped each other to discuss the main topic and character development in the novel. They all had a favourite character and a favourite chapter in the novel. Listening to their thoughts was a great joy for me.

How about a vocabulary puzzle?

Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

In the process of reading Great Expectations, we are learning a lot of new words. Some of them can be seen very often in the book. So, in order to make our students internalize this new words and improve their vocabulary, we created a word puzzle.

These are the words we should find in the puzzle:

ORPHAN                                     FORTUNE                            CHAIN
BLACKSMITH                             GRAVEYARD                        CONVICT
APPRENTICE                              TORCH                                 EXPECTATIO MIST                                           STARVE                               PREPARE
BENEFACTOR                              JAIL                                    CRUEL

(If you can't remember you can get help from your dictionary.)

Here is our puzzle: (you can see bigger if you click the link below.)

Great Expectations Vocabulary Puzzle

We have started reading "Great Expectations"

 Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

This month, March is our reading month! Our students are reading one of the most outstanding novels of English Literature, "Great Expectations" from Charles Dickens.

Dickens was one of the authors we worked on the previous months. Our students researched about his life, his works, his lifetime challenges etc. They even masqueraded as him during the presentation month.

And finally we are reading one of his masterpieces. We hope our students will learn a lot from this marvellous story. Our great expectation is that the students can feel close to some kind hearted characters in the story. 

To maintain a full understanding of the story for our 6th graders, we obtained the stage which is suitable for their English level. We're still at the process of reading and analyzing the story before the last event of the project.

Our e-magazine is now on our school website

Tuğba Kiracı and Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

Our school, 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School has publised our e-magazine on its website.

Now all of our students, their parents and our colleagues can see our joint product. As project teachers we hope to inspire everybody who follows our project by sharing this lovely e-magazine as much as we can.

You can see the details in the link below:

https://chryslerortaokulu.meb.k12.tr/icerikler/projemizin-subat-ayi-etkinligi-e-dergi-olusturma_12526152.html

Our e-magazine is ready to read!

As you know, we selected ten spesific authors by conducting a survey among our students last month. Our students had fun and learned a lot of things about them. But these authors are milestones for English Literature, one by one. So we thought that preparing noticeboards and making short presentations are not enough to know these extraordinarily talented and creative figures of English Literature. That’s why, we decided to create an e-magazine with the help of our students.

We considered that this activity might be an opportunity to bring students from different schools together and form an interaction between them. We formed 7 teams for 7 teachers. Each team had students who were chosen randomly with web 2.0 tool Keamk and each team had a mission (researching, desingning, forming a quiz, making videos etc.) to fullfill.

And now, our "Time Travel in Literature E-magazine" is published and ready to read. You can click the link below and reach our collaborative/joint product:

Time travel in literature e-magazine

Team 6, Cute Stars has finished working on e-magazine pages

Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School

In February, Team 6, Cute Stars studied on distinguished authors Daniel Defoe and Virginia Woolf. They gathered information and brought them together. We distributed tasks, some of our students gathered information about writers and their works. We had a leader, we had a logo designer. Some of our students made chatterpix videos for these authors. Here are some documetnts we searched:

And our final e-magazine pages are ready. According to the information above we formed our pages. Here you can see our pages:

Team 6 is ready to work

Alev Çalımbay Atakul / 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School


Say hello to Team 6. We call our team Cute Stars.

Our team leader is Erva from Maltepe Girls' Religious High School.

We are studying on the two important authors of English Literature, Daniel Defoe and Vriginia Woolf. Each student is studying on a different task about these authors. At the end, we will bring them together and share our knowledge with each other.

We hope, thanks to this collaborative activity, our fund of knowledge about English Literature will increase.

Team 6 Cute Stars

Our team logo is as cute as our team name and our team members. It is designed by Yiğit 52, who is one of our cutest stars in the team. Here is Cute Stars logo:

Celebrating E-safety day

Alev Çalımbay Atakul 50. Yıl Chrysler Secondary School 

We are celebrating e-safety day. So, one of my students, who loves to design logos, posters and etc. designed a poster for this special event. You can see it below:

 

Ready for February activities?

All of our students are randomly teamed up for a new activity in February.

This month our students will work together, cooperate and create an e-magazine with the help of mentor teachers. They will consolidate their knowledge of authors they studied in the previous month and learn to design a full magazine.

You can reach our team list below:

Time Travel in Literature

 

"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you"

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We are going to discover English literature by learning about the lives and works of famous writers who left their mark in history. We are going to create an atmosphere in which students will travel in time, try to understand those ages by portraying authors . We are going to have presentations and use web.2 tools to bring the past to the present. It follows reading a book by Charles Dickens and students will try to rewrite the ending. This will be an excellent way of encouraging pupils to read widely and improve critical reading and spoken language skills.