There are incredible lessons, projects, and opportunities for students throughout Lansing High School. To share these initiatives, Dr. Penrose sends an all-staff email with pictures of an assignment, project, or activity and titles it "Name It, Claim It." The teacher responsible then replies to all staff to briefly explain what the unit is, what they are doing, and any reactions. The email allows teachers to visit other teachers' classrooms virtually and start conversations about student learning, cross-curricular activities, and differentiation.
The October 25 "Name It, Claim It" features ELA Teacher Maeve Bolin:
The project is hexagonal thinking.
The point of hexagonal thinking is to use the color coding to create connections among ideas. It's great for analysis, classification, evaluation, research, planning, and lots of other skills.
This was the first poetry unit in AP Literature. They read poems about characters from Greek/Roman literature, which made the analysis a little more comfortable since they were already familiar with a lot of the characters.
The pink hexagons are facts about the characters, green is quotes from the poem, yellow identifies literary characteristics, and orange provides commentary. One tip I shared with groups was to write down lots of details from the poems on the green hexagons and then decide where to connect them. This helped them make more connections.
I really enjoyed the days in class when the students were putting this together. Most of the physical work was done on a block day. Once we finished, I gave them the packets of poems they chose from, and they did a gallery walk to see how their peers analyzed the different poems.