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!
3 comments:
Hey Eddie!
It's always interesting to see how different classes do the same sort of activity with similar elements but unique twists. My class also focused on the elections but we elected a class president. So we talked about the presidential election, but we tried to make it more relatable by having a class election, complete with speeches, debates, and commercials. I think it would've been interesting to hold a mock election since my students were really good at identifying who was running President and Vice President for both parties.
The BME sounds like a really interesting visual that can really help some students understand the concept of summarization. I just might have to try that for myself.
I am so glad that you were able to relate the activities that this blogger has done with his class to your own experience. If you would like to read another perspective on using a mock election in an elementary school, I would suggest http://notquitegrownup.blogspot.com/. After reading about several experiences with holding class elections, I wish that our class would have done one. As it was, I am not sure that my first graders even understood what was going on. Several of them thought that the best part of election day was the "I voted" stickers!
Eddie,
I've always been curious about in-school mock national elections. I tend to steer clear of them for fear of inadvertently pushing my own political agenda. Especially as a first year teacher, that could be a lot of feathers to ruffle. This blog gave a cool insight in to how that worked out. Thanks for sharing, my good friend!
-Peter
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