Toy Video

My group's video made with McDonald's toys.

This Semester in a Nutshell

    What does it look like to teach reading and writing in an elementary classroom?   How do you use a Writer's Notebook?  What is a Multigenre Research Paper?  How do you get kids interested in writing?
     These are all questions that I wouldn't have been able to answer well at the beginning of the semester, and to be honest, I think I still have a lot to learn about what this looks like for me as a teacher.  However, I have made great strides this semester toward discovering the answers to these questions.  Both in my cluster classes and in my field placement I have gathered many strategies, methods, and activities I can't wait to try out in my future classroom.
     I think one of the most important things I learned about this semester is how crucial it is to give children choices in reading a writing.  Let them make choices not only about what they read and write, but how they demonstrate their learning to you.  I think it is also so important to help students make the connection between what they are learning in the classroom and their lives outside the classroom.  Giving students choices is a great way to bridge the gap that is too often present between these two.
     My field experience teacher was a wonderful literacy role model for me.  A lot of what we learned in class she does in her classroom.  All of her students have Writer's Notebooks in which they can write about anything they want.  At the beginning of Writer's Workshop, the teacher teaches a "mini-lesson." The kids are then encouraged to try what was discussed during the mini-lesson in their writing.  Recently the students have been getting one piece of writing that they got to chose ready for publishing, which they will do on the school laptops.  They are also working on a "How-to" book.  This writing is a little bit more structured than the normal writer's workshop, but the students are allowed to chose whatever they want to write their how-to book on.  My field placement teacher has taught me a lot about what reader's and writer's workshop can look like in an elementary classroom.
      All in all, I have learned the most this semester than I have learned any other semester here are IU.  I am very glad I have this blog to help me remember all that I learned this semester.  I guess I just hope that I won't forget it all by the time I have my own classroom.  I have learned so so much this semester that I hope my brain can retain it all and it will all come back when I need it to.  I think that right now I have a good foundation to build off of and now it just comes to me tweaking things while I figure out what works best for me and my students.

My animantion

    I made this video using http://www.xtranormal.com.  I think what I found really cool about this site was all the different languages that you could make a video in.  I think this could be a great tool for ELL students to use to practice their language skills.  They could make a bilingual video like I did in mine.

                                        

That means the pivotal question for teachers – a moral as well as a practical question – is whether they will treat students the way they, themselves, are being treated . . . or the way they wish they were being treated.

                                                             - Alfie Kohn, How to Create Nonreaders

Wow, that is a tough question to confront.  I have always been a huge supporter of student-centered classrooms.  I really do believe in letting kids control their own learning.  I think that is what makes life-long learners.  My mom always told me when I would get discouraged in school "It's ok Anna.  Right now you are just learning how to learn.  Not every way will be best for you.  Don't worry about memorizing facts, just learn how to learn."
     I feel so lucky that this viewpoint has been instilled in me.  But it also makes me nervous going into teaching.  What do I do with the kids who can't handle making their own choices even when given the opportunity?  What do I do when kids aren't interested in learning?
   I guess my question is: where is the balance?  The article says to bring kids into the decision making process when possible.  But how do you find the balance between being a facilitator, giving kids the push they might need, and letting them explore things for themselves and hold themselves accountable for their own learning?
     This article did give me some starting points though, and I think it will just be a process of figuring out what works for me in the classroom.

Creativity, Where did you go?

        Life can either fuel creativity or suck it right out of you.  I feel like as this semester has passed me by, my creativity has flown away with it.  Life is just simply too busy!
       This Multigenre Research Paper has been a breath of fresh air in the stingy environment of law papers and drab articles.  I love being encouraged to write things with true expression.  I loved exploring my topic through different genres.  I loved being cut loose from the chains that usually hold us down as writers in college.
      For my genres I wrote an "I am from..." poem from the perspective of a child that is denied access to an education.  I created an obituary for a child's dream of going to school.  I wrote a letter from a child that had been sponsored to go to school to her sponsor.  I also made a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting my life to the life of a child who does not have the opportunity to go to school.  My last genre was more interactive.  It's somewhat hard to describe, so I thought I would just post it up here:

            Only 84% of children that are primary school age actually attend primary school.   This means that approximately 1 in 7 children do not attend primary school.  Often times, it is factors that are outside of the children’s control that keep them from attending school.  Pick a letter, A, B, C, D, E, F, or G then go to the next page to see if you would get to go to school or not. (NO PEEKING!)

 

Read the life scenario that corresponds to the letter you chose.  Just like you had very little control over which life you received in this activity, many children have no control over whether or not they have the opportunity to attend school.  People are born into a variety of positions in life.  It is often where we are born that determines what kinds of opportunities will be available to us.  People do not have to live the lives they were born into, but it is much harder to break the cycle without an education.

A. You are 5 years old and you were born in Oregon, United States.  You have 3 older brothers who you like to play soccer with after school.  You just started kindergarten this fall and you love learning to read.  When you grow up, you want to go to Oregon State University and play for their soccer team.

B. You are 8 years old and you were born in Stockholm, Sweden.  You are an only child.  You are in the third grade and your favorite subject in school is art.  You love going to the art galleries and your dream is to one day go to Paris to study art.

C. You are 7 years old and you were born in Pakistan to a wealthy family.  You have one older brother.  After school your older brother helps you with your homework.  Your family just got a new computer that you love playing on.  You study very hard so that when you grow up you can become a computer scientist.

D. You are 9 years old and you were born in Seoul, South Korea.  When your father comes home from work at night you love sharing with him everything that you learned in school that day.  He is very proud of you.  You want to study very hard so that when you grow up, you can be a lawyer just like him.

E.  You are 10 years old and you were born in New Delhi, India.  Everyday you watch the other kids in their uniforms off to school wishing you could join them.  You don’t get to go because your parents keep you home to work on the small family farm.  You have dreamed of becoming a doctor, but you know that your dream will never come true and you will always work your family’s farm.

F.  You are 6 years old and you were born in Freiburg, Germany.  You love spending time after school at the park with your friends.  You are so excited because you have just started reading your first chapter book!  When you grow up, you want to be an author.

G.  You are 10 years old and you were born in San Miguel, Ecuador.  You just started going to school when a new school was built by an organization called Free The Children.  Before, your parents couldn’t afford to send you to school and your mother needed your help at home.  However, after Free The Children built a new school your parents realized the importance of education.  You want to go to school so you can be a teacher when you grow up.

  I am excited for our experience tomorrow at Templeton.  I think it will be great to have this interaction with real students.  They can learn from us, and we can learn a lot from them!

Seedfolks: building off of common ground

"...everybody left.  Buildings abandoned.  Men with no work drinking from nine to five instead, down there in the lot.  Always the sirens, people killing each other." -Ana (Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, pg. 7)

"It had been such a wonderful change to see people making something for themselves instead of waiting for a welfare check.  To see part of the neighborhood looking better every day, and to smell those good smalls of growing plants." -Florence (Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, pg. 85)

     It's amazing how a little bit of green can completely change a community, even bring a community together like it did in Seedfolks.  Last year I spent my spring break helping out in an after-school program and spending time with the people that live in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Philadelphia.  While I was there, what shocked me the most was how little "green" there was.  There was trash and needles everywhere on the ground, but not trees or bushes.  The parks were all concrete and the little grass that was present was either brown or covered with trash.  I couldn't imagine growing up in a place that had more glass bottles on the ground than trees.

      Early this semester I went to see Majora Carter speak at the IU auditorium.  She is an activist and consultant that has played a huge part in the greening of the South Bronx and other cities around the country.  She spoke on how the greening of a city can truly transform a community for the better.  She said that crime rates and other social "problems" significantly decrease in cities that have parks.  Many of her projects provide employment and empowerment for the community members. While I was listening to her speak, I kept getting all these grand ideas in my head about partnerships between my future classroom and local activists and all these different things I could do to empower the students in my classroom through hands-on experiences.

      The garden in the book Seedfolks brought that desolate community together.  The people had something to take pride in, something that made their community visually beautiful.  The garden bonded them together and connected them with their physical location.  It provided them with healthy food to eat and a non-threatening place to meet the people that lived next door to them, the people they saw in the store and on the street everyday but had never thought about talking to.

Photo from www.greeningofdetroit.com

It makes me excited thinking about getting involved myself in projects like this, and then getting my students involved.  Something like this with a class could be a beautiful collision of life lessons, practical skills, and academic "standards."  And that, it what makes me excited to teach.

*another cool organization to check out is The Greening of Detroit.  They have been doing work like this in Detroit for over 20 years now!  They do a variety of youth and community educational programs and would a be a good resource for ideas of things to do with a class.

Poetry is more than the words on the page

"It's the poet inside of me who knows how to live.  It's the poet inside of me who is wide awake, and ready to embrace the beauty, the challenges, and the mysteries in life.  It's the poet inside of me who celebrates living on a daily basis, and finds extraordinary joys in very ordinary moments" (p. 10)

    This is an excerpt from Kalli Dakos' letter to young poets in the book Seeing the Blue Between.  I love everything about this quote.  It captures so much truth about poetry and what it means to be a poet.  Kids don't understand and are never taught that poetry is more than just the lines you write down on the page.  Poetry allows you to see the world in a way that is different than how most people see it.  This was the message behind many of the poet's letters in this book.  Observe the world around.  Use your sense.  Make inferences.  Give objects a voice.  Explore words. Make up words. Expose truth.  This is what being a poet is really about.

By Shell Silverstein, a great classroom poet.

   But how do we get there?  Very few students could just sit down and write an amazing poem.  We must help them along the way.  The Multigenre Research Paper book gave many different mini-lessons on poetry that can help kids practice their poetry skills.  It seems like it is best to give students structure in their poems to begin with.  Teach them to write acrostic poems, or outlined poems like the "I am" poems.  This will help them gain confidence in their poetry abilities.  Then give them free reign.  Have them read other poet's poetry.  Let them write in free verse.  I think this is the part that many teachers miss out on.  So many kids have bad experiences with poetry because all they have written are Haiku's and acrostic poems.  They haven't really become poets.  Give students chances to look at the world in a new way.  Challenge them to use their senses to write.  To break the rules of "normal" English.  Give them the challenge of painting a picture with their words.  That is true poetry.

   The key is though, as teachers, we must show them how.  This doesn't mean that you have to be a wonderful poet yourself, but be familiar with poetry.  Try and understand how poets view the world.  Have students read poems and talk about them and the perspective they give.  Very few people are just born poets, everybody has to learn at some point in time.  Teaching students to view the world as a poet is beneficial in more aspects than just writing poetry.  It helps students learn how to take in the world around them and be aware of what is really going on.