Activities with poetry

I loved the poetry projects we were able to create during last class! I loved taking time to be creative, using so many different materials, words, and thoughts, all based around poetry. When it was time to share, I actually did not want to stop working. It is not often that I get to use my creativity, so sometimes it feels like a burden, however when time to do things such as that is built in with other things, it is SO great! I really think that those types of projects are a great thing to use in the classroom, both with poetry and other types of literature, or perhaps even science or history. Art and music can be integrated into any subject if you simply get creative. I really enjoyed the station using magazine clippings of words to create a poem. This was neat, because it reminded me of the story the whales that we read out of order (in either this class, or 340), in the sense that all of the words were taken out of what each author had put them in, to create something new and different, but completely legitimate.

This is not necessarily directed at this class, although I am attending an IPS school this Friday for my E300 field experience. I am very much looking forward to this, because I have never been in a urban school setting. I feel that this will give me a more diverse look at schools and education, which will only benefit me as a future teacher.

This past week at University, we worked one on one with the fourth grade students for their Writing Workshop. This was great! Although the room was a little crowded, we got to see what this was like in an actual elementary classroom. We were able to also see how creative some of the students could be, and ask questions of the teacher facilitating this. It was wonderful to hear that the children were not corrected on spelling or grammar when writing in these notebooks. These were used purely for the enjoyment and creativity of writing, which I feel makes them really enjoy it. Pushing the students to brainstorm many different ideas is an important aspect of this workshop, because it allows the students to expand their thinking a little bit, without any restrictions. It also allows them to maybe go back and use some of the ideas that they came up with earlier, but chose not to expand on. It was good to see the students excited about writing, and having fun with creating stories.

In class on Wednesday, while working with the newspaper genres and creating our own based on our MGRP, I got some really good ideas for my own project! It was awesome to see what everyone came up with. It allowed me to see the term 'genre' in a more concrete way, because I was actually sort of struggling with what five I would do. Now that I have more ideas, I can use those and apply them to my topic. It was great!

Reflection

In this week's field experience, I was placed in another teachers classroom because of schedule conflict from ISTEP. The room I was in had an exceptional teacher. I was only in that room for roughly an hour, but I could already tell this was a teacher I would want to model myself after. She was laid back, but firm, fun, but serious. I could tell that she wanted the kids to succeed, but she didn't want to 'scare' them into doing so. I feel that it was beneficial to be in that room, if only for a short while, because it allowed me to see that there are teachers like that out there, and that I can be one of them. It is something to mold myself after, while still being true and unique to myself and my own beliefs. It is important to not only realize that every student learns in a different way, but that every teacher also teaches in a different way.

I am also excited about our research paper for this class, because I have chosen to write about a country. The country that I choose will hopefully be the country I will do a portion of my student teaching in. I am fairly certain that I will participate in the cultural immersions project in the spring of 2012, and I am very excited about that. It will be very interesting to see how educational systems are run in other cultures and countries.