Links to other blogs

http://misschristnersblog.blogspot.com/
http://missraysblog7.blogspot.com/
http://missgarciasblog.blogspot.com/
http://meganroberts188.blogspot.com/
http://missatkinsons.blogspot.com/

Shoebox Activity

                    If you had to leave your home and didn’t have time to pack and didn’t know where you were going or coming back and the only things that you could take had to fit in a shoebox, what would you put in that shoebox? Would you take sentimental things that mean a lot to you or would you take things that would define your survival? I decided to include items that would be more useful in terms of surviving. The items that included in my shoebox were: my glasses in case I ran out of solution or lost my contacts, solution for my contacts, toilet paper, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, deodorant and some family pictures. After we got the chance to share our box contents with our classmates we had to answer a couple of questions like what items did you include in your box, what did you learn about yourself, what did you learn about your classmates, and what did this experience make you think about? After completing this whole activity, I learned that an activity can have a big effect on constructing and maintaining a classroom community. Students get the chance to learn more about their classmates at level that they probably wouldn’t have learned just by talking to each other at school. The things that they include in their shoebox are going to be totally different from another student and they are going to have a different meaning to that student. Allowing the students to share the contents with the rest of the class, helps reinforce and build the community that is desperately needed in a classroom. Even you as a teacher will learn a lot from your students. I also learned that having the students answer questions like the ones I had to, allows the students to reflect on what they learned about themselves and their classmates. I can’t wait to recreate this activity in my own classroom someday.

Reader's Theatre

How can we make reading fun? Last week we read a story called “Piggie Pie” and as a class we were each assigned a role that we had to act out. It was interesting to learn about the benefits that can come from having students participate in activities like these. My classmates and I had so much fun recreating the characters and playing the part. This week we got to bring in props and act the story in front of another class and our teachers. I was little nervous, but we had a lot of fun. Some of my classmates went all out trying to recreate their characters, which made their characters more real. In the end, I think that I learned a few tricks as to making reading interesting and fun for my students. Some of the things that I learned were:  we need to choose appropriate reading materials that could be appropriate for all are students, try to match the characters to the personality of the student, model good reading, have props to make the reading more fun, and allow the students to have some freedom and fun.  

Mansion Tour

                  Today was a field trip day where we got the chance to visit historical resources available in our city. I choose to visit the Oliver’s Mansion located in South Bend, IN. It was interesting to visit a building, house, that was built a long time ago and is still standing today. This mansion was maintained the same as when the family was living in it. Their belongings, clothes, furniture, food, dishes, family pictures, and other personal belongings were left in the home and donated to the museum. It was interesting to visit a home like this and imagine what it must have been like living in the home when it was first built. You start to wonder the things that you would do in a big home like this, what would your life be like, what would it feel like living in a time where there weren’t any cars only horses and where everyday customs were different than our own? I can only imagine the questions and thoughts that children might experience when visiting places like these. Allowing children opportunities like these can make history more meaningful to them. It makes it more real too, because it’s more than just reading about it in a history book.  Especially young children benefit from activities like these because they can actually physically experience some form of history and it makes it a little easier to believe that the things they are learning in their books is actually real and really did happen. As teachers we need to provide experiences like these as often as possible. I know that times are getting harder to do activities like these, but there are other ways to make history come to life more our students to understand the world that they live in.

Learning Centers

                     As future teachers, we are always wondering about the things that can we do to teach an effective lesson. How do we teach a topic in way that it can be fun and that students will actually learn? Recently we’ve been working on creating centers for students to practice certain skills that we are teaching. We got the chance to focus on a topic and create a learning center that we would use with younger children. My classmates and I had to work in groups of four, create a learning center, and recreate that center for our other classmates to complete. We ended up having a really good time creating our centers and sharing them with our classmates. We ended up having centers where we got to dress up as community workers, such as firefighters, nurses, doctors, policemen, cooks, and many more. Other centers included taking trips around the world by looking at actual foreign currency, drawing pictures of homes and community workers, and practice using money by pretending to buy items with play money.  In the end I felt that I learned a lot about making learning fun and I got many good ideas of how I can implement fun activities in my own classroom someday.

Decades Project

              Throughout our education we are always doing some kind of research in order to better understand our world. Even in the younger grades, students are introduced and being prepared in the whole research process. The images that you see are of my classmates’ “Decades Project.” We had to choose a decade and do some research on it. We had to do the research, create a poster board, bring in some artifacts from that decade, and dress up according to our decade for the presentations. My group chose the 70’s as our decade. What we wanted to include in our poster board was our decision, as well as what we wanted to present. The freedom that we had to include what we wanted and how to do it was very rewarding. We had a lot of fun learning about our decade and dressing up. My group decided to dress up as the characters from “Schoolhouse Rock.” This was an educational cartoon that taught children about a topic through songs.  Since we were dressing up as cartoon characters, we had to create our own costumes. My costume was pretty easy because it just consisted of a blue shirt with a white star in the middle and red pants.

 This project allowed us, as future teachers, to think about the importance of having our students do these research projects. It made us think about what do we want our students to learn from these projects and whether or not they are effective. I think that a project like this can really benefit children. We would probably have to provide more guidelines as to what they are expected to include in their project, but at the same time we still have to allow them the freedom to do it their own way. A project like our “Decades Project” can allow children to really understand their topic because it makes it more real to them, rather than just a boring topic that they might be reading in a book.   

Traditions

This is a picture of my god-daughters’ baptism. They were so excited to wear their new white dresses and get their hair all done for the event. The older one, who is eight-years-old, understood a little more of what this event represented and why she was going through this ceremonial tradition. As a teacher we are going to have children with diverse backgrounds and have different traditions than our own, but it is important that we respect these differences. These traditions and cultures makes us who we are and we, as teachers and human beings, need to acknowledge that they are part of who we are and what we have come to believe in. These two little girls might not remember their baptism, but for the rest of their lives they are going to know that they are part of the church and that religion is very important. What they learn at church and at home, is going to help shape these two growing individuals