Reflection to Week 12

I enjoyed viewing the example Digital Stories, especially the one about the new teacher. The examples helped me better understand what makes up a Digital Story.  Before this class, I didn't realize all of the components that a digital story must include, such as an interesting question to answer, the impact on the audience, the power of the student's voice, etc. But after today's class, I have a much better understanding of what a digital story is.  I'm glad we got time to work in our groups to create our own digital stories.  I'm happy that we also have time in class next week to work with our groups.

I also learned a lot in today's class about revision, and why revision is an important part of the writing process.  I liked the handout "Revision Strategies at a Glance."  It was a good organizational tool for how to being the revision process.  It is a good resource to save and use in my own classroom.  

Reflection to Week 11

I really liked the "Reading Photographs" activity that we did last week. The photos that I brought in didn't really work for the activity, but I found a picture on my camera that I had taken over the summer that worked perfectly. I was able to come up with good answers to the analysis questions based on the images in the photo, and because I have actually had the experience that I was depicting, it made it easy to answer the questions such as what are the people doing and how are the people feeling at the moment that the photo was taken. It was an interesting assignment, and I learned a lot from it.

I also learned a lot from the writing analysis on the student writing sample.  My answers and analysis were a little skewed because the writing sample had been edited by the teacher and then corrected by the student.  I did not know that we would be doing this kind of analysis, otherwise I would have asked my teacher for a first draft copy of my student's work.

Reflection to Week 10

While I liked the MGRP- I thought that last week's class could have gone better or have been a little more organized. Walking around the room looking at everyone's projects got a little boring and repetitive. I think it might have worked better if everyone gave a short, (5 min) mini presentation about their topic, and there were time for a few (2-4) questions at the end of each person's presentation. That way, we could still hear about everyone's topic, but in a more organized way. Also, then each person would have only had to give their presentation once, and not time after time. Last week's class went well, but it could have been done a different way.

Reflection to Week 9

I liked how we discussed the rubric for the MGRP. It was good for us, as future teachers, to see how rubrics are created, and what students get out of rubrics.  I liked when Linda mentioned that when students receive rubrics, they only focus on the highest category, so they know what they need to do in order to get the best grade!

In class, we read the book "Voices in the Park" that focused on 4 different voices, and I thought this was an interesting activity.  I was very confused at first, because I didn't understand the text, or what we were supposed to be looking for. It was a lot easier when we heard it a 2nd time. This is a good lesson to learn when teaching kids: that just because something doesn't quite work the first time, you can always alter or adjust the activity to make it work the 2nd time. The adjustment we made in class was to pass out the text, so that we could read along with the people reading the book. This helped a lot.

Reflection to Week 8

I'm glad that we got to evaluate ourselves and our writer's notebooks today. This activity opened my eyes to how I'm doing in this portion of the class.  I realized that most of my entries are narratives and stories about my daily life. I originally started writing like this in the notebook because that is what I'm used to doing when I keep a journal.  Sometimes I forget that our writer's notebooks are more than journals, they are notebooks. I need to work on coming up with more creative entries, such as poetry, lists, nonfiction, etc.

I really liked the activity we did today in class. I had a lot of fun painting pictures based on poetry. It was relaxing, and it also enabled me to read deeper into the poem.  I spent so much time at the painting table, that I only was able to go to one other table. It was a good activity, and it made me think about different activities I can do with my students. 

Reflection to Week 7

I think that having a classmate read my paper really helped.  It was helpful to another set of eye look over the work that I had done, and my partner gave me pointers of how I could make my paper better.  I didn't realize that we could personalize our paper with our own experiences and knowledge, and my partner helped me see that these small additions could really give my paper a more personal feel. I guess I am so used to writing strictly research papers, that I forgot that we could have a little fun with this paper.

I also liked how we were given class time to work on an "extra piece" for our overall project. I took advantage of this time, and I came up with a good start to an extra piece, and I think that I will actually use it for one of my pieces. It was fun to watch other people present the extra pieces that they created in that short time period. It gave me lots of ideas and suggestions for what an extra piece can look like.

Reflection to Week 6

Today, in class, we discussed our ideas for our Multi-Genre Research Paper by coming up with different questions for our topics.  I originally struggled with this activity because I didn't know what kind of questions I should write down, but once I started coming up with a few, it became a lot easier to ask good questions.  We learned about different kinds of questions in class, and we categorized them into 3 groups: Nice to know, Need to Know, and Essentials Questions.  I have heard of students doing activities like this before, but I had never really learned about the three different groups. After we came up with questions for out topic, we organized our questions so that they would fit into one of the groups.  This is a good activity for students to do, so they can organize their thoughts. This activity gave me a starting point for my paper, and it pointed me in the right direction, in terms of coming up with main points and ideas to write about.

Reflection to Week 5

This is a reflection to how my teaching the "Unit of Study" assignment went:

My unit of study was picture books that used the alphabet as a base. The book I used to teach my group was "Alphabet Atlas." by Arthur Yorinks.  In this book, each page is a new letter (A,B, C, etc), and that letter represents a different country, starting with the same letter.  On one page is a short paragraph about the country and on the other page there is a picture of the map of the country. I used this book as an example, because I felt like it could connect well to a social studies unit on geography (meaning it went deeper than just learning about the alphabet), and I said this to my group when I started explaining the activity.  The activity I created was to assign each student a letter, and they would have to pick a different country starting with that letter, and write their own mini-paragraph about the country. I would then combine all of the student pages, and create a "Class Alphabet Atlas."  The activity I planned would be more appropriate for upper-elementary students, because it involves a little outside research. I think I did a good job of explaining my activity the members in group, and they all seemed to like the book that I chose.

I liked this assignment because we were actually able to create our own mini-lessons based on picture books. We have been reading about mini-lessons for the past several weeks, so it was a good experience to come up with our own mini-lessons.

Class Reflection- Week 4

I connected a lot to the punctuation portion of today's class because I actually saw the importance of punctuation in my field experience, earlier this morning. I am in a 1st grade class at University School, so my students are only learning the basics of punctuation, and so far they have covered when to use periods, exclamation points, question marks at the end of different sentences.  Today, the students worked together as a class to come up with sentences using their spelling words. My cooperating teacher, Mrs. McGurry, would call on a student, and that student would have to come up with a sentence using a particular spelling word. The student was able to decide if that sentence would be a statement (ending in a period), an feeling sentence (using an exclamation point) or a question sentence (ending in a question mark). After the student described what kind of sentence it should be, Mrs. McGurry would read the sentence using the punctuation that was called for (Ex: being really excited and loud if the sentence ended with an exclamation point). Mrs. McGurry did a good job of modeling how the sentence should sound with that specific type of punctuation. Also, during Literacy groups, I have noticed that in the books that my students are reading, there are many commas and apostrophes used.  I haven't actually seen the students write using commas and apostrophes, but they have been introduced to them. Today's theme was reading books with the word "that's" which was in place of "that is."

On a separate note, I really enjoyed sharing our "Craft Lessons" with our small groups today.  It was a good way for us to learn about different lessons that we could potentially use in our future classrooms. I liked seeing how certain books worked really well with specific lessons, and it gave me new ideas for how to incorporate picture books into more advanced lessons.

Class 3 Reflection

I really liked the exercises we did today about "Reading like a Writer" with the excerpts from "The Leaving Morning" and "The Relatives Came."  The fact that we had read these books before and were familiar with them made this activity easier than if we had never hear of the books before. I'm glad that we only analyzed small portions of the two books, because we were able to thoroughly analyze the texts. I liked how this assignment was fairly simple and I liked how it involved discussion and learning from each other. It is definitely  something I would do with my students, because it gets them involved in the story and it makes them think about why the author chose to write the story a certain way.

On another note, I'm glad that the book "Craft Lessons" isn't like other textbooks. Before today's class, I had not looked through the book, so I didn't know what to expect when we discussed it today. After learning about the purpose of the book, I really like that the book gives so many options and choices for lesson plans relating to teaching reading and writing. I also really like how the book gives specific examples of children's books that can be used with specific lessons. This a book that I can see myself keeping after this semester is over so that I can use it as a reference when I am teaching.

Reflection to Week 2

I really enjoyed the time we got in class to decorate our Writer's Notebooks. I love scrap-booking and being creative, and I was so glad that we were able to express our creativity on the covers of our notebooks. It was a nice way for us to really think about how we wanted to express ourselves through our writing. While the pictures I used didn't necessarily represent my hobbies or interests, I was really happy with some of the word choices I used to decorate my cover, such as "Home," "Dream," and "Discover." It was my birthday yesterday, so I included a word cut out that I found that said, "New Year, New You." I think the words described who I am, and the pictures just added a nice touch to the cover. Going off of the quote at the bottom of the 2nd page in the Agenda packet, ("How might I use these images to inspire and inform my writing?") I would say that the words and pictures that I used describe what makes me happy and excited, so hopefully the entries in my writer's notebook will be about happy memories and experiences.

Response to class on 9/1

I really enjoyed the excerpts we read today,  from "The House on Mango Street" and "Never in a Hurry" because I like leaning about the origin and meaning of names. I know it sounds kind of silly, but I used to go on "baby name" websites just to research and find fun facts about my friends' and family members' names. I also liked looking up the names of my favorite characters in books and movies, jut to see if the meaning of their names fit their characters.

In the "House of Mango Street" excerpt that we read, we learned how even though the narrator was named after her great-grandmother, she didn't want to end up like her great-grandmother did. I sometimes wish that I was named for someone, just so I could relate to that person. But my parents did not pick my name because they wanted to name me after a relative or someone important. It's actually a funny story how they picked "Abigail" as my name. My mom once told me this story of how her and my dad walked around the pre-school in my grandparent's synagogue to get ideas for baby names. It was between "Abigail" and "Amanda" for girls names, and they decided on Abigail, because they liked the nick-name "Abby," which is what everyone calls me now.