Middle school Week 1

Lauren and I went to Nathan Bishop Middle School this week. It has been a good experience so far. We are with Mrs. Fox , she is the seventh grade English teacher. She is really high energy and alot of fun, it is clear that she has built a community with her students. She laughs and jokes with the students but at the same time they are able to get through a lesson and stay on task.
Her classroom fits her personality. She has student work literally strung across the room. The students had made masks for different characters in King Lear, those are displayed on one side of the room. The walls have more student work from class activities and colorful posters. Bloom's Taxonomy is also up there. It is definitely a fun place to walk into. I can see why the students enjoy being in her class. After watching a few classes I could see why she had the classroom set up the way she does. During every lesson she would remind students: "We talked about this theme when...." and she would point over to a paper on the wall or when they were reading prompts for an essay they are going to write she pointed to the questions that are strung across the ceiling. Most of the "decorations" around the room are reminders that the students already tackled the information for the  final essay. We were in the class when the essay was assigned and the prompts were given out. As soon as Mrs. Fox started pointing out that they were choosing from topics that they were discussing all quarter the mood switched from stressed to super confident.
The classes are not split up into levels, there is no high level or low level class. Mrs. Fox teaches four seventh grade English classes, her fifth class is an ELL class that she co-teaches. We watched all of the classes and Lauren and I were both surprised with the material they are learning. This week Mrs. Fox has been doing mini lessons on how to cite information with MLA format for their essays about King Lear. They are practicing using short and long quotes and making the quotes flow with their writing....we were both like what??? we never used MLA till college and I don't think I was asked to use quotes until high school! Then when she assigned that essay, the students were asking if they could come up with their own themes to write about rather than using the ones she had listed....the students were like "can I write about justice instead?" and "I would like to do sibling rivalry". I was sitting there thinking this isn't even happening. They are so engaged!
She does have one class that is behind the other three. When she was talking to us about that class she had said that it is tough with them because of the way the periods rotate with the three day schedule. No matter what that class is always either the first period of the day or the last period of the day. I didn't realize how much of an impact that could have on a class. In the morning students are late or not really awake yet and then last period of the day they just want to get out.