Scientific Progress Goes "Blog!" (or a Blog I like)

I searched google for beginning teachers and found this website,http://www.education.com/magazine/column/Mr_Teacher/

It is written and updated by a Mr. John Pearson and is in early years of teaching.

Well first off he wrote a book about his very first year of teaching and you can check out more on that here http://learnmegood2.blogspot.com/.  I really enjoyed this site as I was able to identify with two things that are occurring or have occurred in my classroom.  The first thing is that my school held a mock election concerning the Presidency, and I thought this was such a neat idea because I never heard of it being used anywhere else.  The school that Mr. Pearson is at even put the pictures of Obama and McCain on the ballot to make it more personal and meaningful to the child that is voting.  This is one idea that I would love to implement in my future classroom when an election is around the corner.  The second area that my class is focusing on is summarization.  During our English Arts portion of our day my students are reading their novels/book/stories and then are required to summarize on a page briefly what their tale was about.  Mr. Pearson had an interesting method of doing this summarization.  This method is a visual tool that is called a BME fold and basically this shows the beginning, middle and end of the story.  He describes it as, "Imagine a piece of paper folded in half lengthwise (or "hotdog style" for the gastronomically challenged). The front half is cut into three equal sections, creating "doors" for each part of the story. On the inside, the children write an important event from each part and draw a picture of that event." I also really liked this idea as the children can have a visual representation of how the story should unfold with their summarization.  This is definitely something I would like to do in my future classroom as well or even perhaps right now!

Post Four: Becoming the Archetype

Prompt: "Now that you are nearing the end of your first quarter of your internship, what has been your biggest surprise about being in the classroom and working with students?"

-The biggest surprise that I have encountered in my particular classroom focuses on community learning. I had no idea how powerful a tool this could be when one implements it at the beginning of the school year through class purpose or code of cooperation. It is great to see students supporting each other as they journey together through education in order to achieve their highest potential. Quite honestly, I was surprised to see my teacher use this aspect of community learning as much as he does, but found that it is very useful. The students keep each other accountable for their learning and in end take ownership for their learning as the teacher moves to the role of a facilitator. As I become the archetype of my cooperating teacher I will continually seek to support this community learning within this classroom as it provides the necessary structures for my students to achieve their goals (academically and socially).

Teaching and Reteaching

1. Learning Target:
a. Recognize components of culture
-Students will know what folktales are and how they relate to Native American culture.
-Understand that folktales have key elements that make them unique from other stories (i.e. theme, conflict, oral storytelling, etc).
-Learn the value of responsibility.

During my lesson, students are able to follow along in a read-aloud in the form of a folktale. This introduces Native American culture to my students who have little to no experience with anything related to Coastal Indians. Through reading this folktale, The Old Owl Witch, students were given the learning opportunity of finding one key component to Native American culture, folktales. After the reading is done the students are then put together in groups where the discuss three questions: what a folktale is; a folktale's common elements; and the author's purpose. They write their answers on whiteboards and then share with the rest of the class what exactly they learned. As a class we discuss these three questions, which leads my students back to my learning goal of recognizing components of culture.

2.I start off my lesson with a read-aloud, which my students are very engaged in. However, before I even begin this I show my class the cover of the book I will be reading. I inform them that today we are going to start our new Social Studies unit, which centers around culture. I ask them whose culture is represented in the artwork on the cover of this book. My students are able to answer this question right off the bay, which gets the lesson off to a great start as they already have connected folktales to Native American culture. When my students were put into their groups to discuss the three questions I presented to the class I was able to go around to each table to monitor their learning. Many of the students had prior knowledge of what folktales were and how they different from other forms of storytelling. More importantly, every single group was able to tell me and rest of the class during their presentations what the author's purpose as we as humans are responsible for our actions (and words). My students struggles with some of the key elements of what makes a folktale a folktale, but every group informed me that folktales have to have a moral that is related back to culture. All of these things informed me that my class recognized components of culture and more specifically how folktales are related to Native American culture.

3. I would definitely let my students guide more of the discussion instead of me limiting these learning opportunities. I held to my rigid lesson plan which did not allow room for flexibility and organic learning. I also felt pressed for time and moved at a quicker pace than I should have. I should have opened the floor up to this organic learning when I asked discussion questions, but instead limited their responses so that only a few individuals answered.

4. My extension activity would be to allow my students to write their own folktales after we covered what the essential elements of a folktale were. I would have paired the students up with another individual so that they could collaborate ideas and formulate a structure to their folktale. Since these students successfully met the learning goals and understand how folktales related to Native American culture it would be wise to let them experiment with creating their own folktale. However, I would provide them with a challenge, and that would be to make their folktale relevant to their individual culture.