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.