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Ms.Alvarado
Friday, April 27, 2012
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
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