Week 4

Week #4

       I really enjoyed the write around activity. I had done it before in classes and also liked it then. It's a nice strategy that can be used in many subject areas where you want students to be able to share their thoughts and hear other people's thoughts as well. I think this is great because as a student I did not like speaking up in class especially when it was a debate or something opinionated. I would have really liked this because I could agree or disagree with my peers without feeling uncomfortable.

       The activity where we had to draw a picture of a character in Spirit Bear was a lot of fun! It allowed us to be creative and there is not one way to draw a character. It gives the teacher a chance to see if the student remembers basic facts about the person to be able to draw them. It also shows that the student can interpret what they may look like based on their actions in the book. It is a fun way for students to be able to visualize the characters especially if they have trouble with this on their own.

        The plagiarizing activity was a cool one as well because it is a creative way to teach the concept without explicitly saying don't plagiarize. I know as a student it was confusing to understand how to put it in your own words and when you had to cite things. Doing this activity would have made the concept easier for me. I liked it as well because it tests comprehension of a story. The student has to write down what they find important to remember in only key words and then they have to tell the story. It increases students' ability to summarize and find important, key details. I think this would be fun in any content area too. For example if you give the students each a primary article about a topic then have each one tells the others about it using key words they wrote down. This would be easier for students to understand the article because they would have to put it in their own words and say it how they understood it. In social studies or history this may need more scaffolding if the articles are harder to understand.

     I think if most of my students have ipads or my school has access to them making imovies would be a fun assignment! I think most kids enjoy making videos and putting them to music. I know I had this assignment in school and it was the thing I remember most from history in middle school. It would be interesting to see how creative students could be if they made movies about books. They could create alternate ending to the book or tell the story from another character's perspective.