Grade 8: Choice...and censorship

This post courtesy of Middle School teacher Lindsay Anderson.

For Remembrance Day, students were given an option for how to represent a veteran's story of their choosing:  poem, interview, illustration, letter, etc. One of my students did an amazing job on this assignment! He is really into Call-of-Duty video games (war based), and so first of all liked the idea of researching a real war veteran. He wanted to not only create a picture, but also write a poem! (He was only required to complete one option but decided to do an extra one as well). I wanted to blog about this particular assignment because in this assignment I saw how by allowing this student to make connections to something I didn't really "approve" of, he came up with something really meaningful. When this student was working on this assignment, he was chatting with his friends and making connections to his video game. A part of me wanted to shut the discussion down, but a part of me enjoyed seeing him get so excited about something that he is good at, and apply it to the assignment.  On a similar note, a few weeks ago students were given the option of creating Facebook pages on the protagonist in one of our stories,again, I was thinking, Is Facebook really appropriate? but the results that I got were excellent. Students loved using Facebook. They totally hit the learning outcome (showing conflict), and had fun.