Learning Goals

So far this semester I have been working on my specific learning goals. Things have been going pretty good with my class, however I still find myself working on my goal of becoming more comfortable in the classroom and learning how to manage a class full of students better. One learning goal that I have had a lot of progress on is developing lesson plans that incorporate art projects in an affective way. I did a visual arts lesson with my class. I read them a story with the cover of book hidden with paper. After the story, the students were to draw a cover to the story, using what they remembered from the story to develop their cover a title for the story. While many students were excited about the lesson I had a few students who didn't even try the project despite my host teacher asking them to corporate. Many of the students enjoyed this lesson because it was something different from their typical worksheets and workbooks. I am working more towards this goal in the hopes of engaging the students who seemed lost during my first art lesson. My second art lesson the students will be creating puppets to a story they will read in class the day before.

Reflecting On Our Blogs

After reading my original posting from last Fall (2010) about the potential of using a blog to reflect on my experiences in my PDS and the Five-Year Program, I have come to understand why keeping a blog will be a useful tool in the near future when I am a full time teacher. It will allow me to keep track of my ideas and share my ideas and problems with other teachers in the hopes of receiving advice as well as sharing my advice with others. I think the most effective thing a blog can do for reflection on practice is that it allows us to receive feedback from other people. I think the blogs we have created can be more useful if the whole Benedum Program used it and all our assignments were posted on our blog.

I think it is important to hear about what our classmates are doing in their PDS’s because we are all at different schools with different students, it is nice to see how the schools around our area are different, even though they are only a few miles away from each other. Being able to share my blog with my seminar facilitator and PDS faculty would allow me to address issues and ideas that I have in an easy way. I think it would be a good idea to have us write about a certain issue we have come across in our PDS and then get the opinions of the people who have access to our blogs. I would find it useful to use our blogs to talk about lessons we have taught, this way we can share our ideas with our peers. Not only can we share information and ideas with our peers, but we can also reflect on what we do ourselves. Having all our reflections conveniently located in one spot instead of on paper would help with organization. We would be able to keep our reflections all in one area and go to specific reflections on lessons before we teach that lesson again.

Some things that I think would be useful involving our blog would be to post actual lessons we have done, along with our reflection on the lesson. Doing this would allow our partners, seminar facilitator, and PDS faculty to see our ideas and what we think about our lessons. I also think it would be cool if we had access to the blogs of everyone in our class that way we can read other people’s blog and we aren’t so limited. It would be nice to have others read our ideas and have them comment on them too. I think for our blog to be most effective it needs to be used more throughout the semester.

Question: What is your favorite thing about having a blog for the Benedum Program?

My Learning Goals and Practicum Plan

- One of my learning goals is to do a tutor activity dealing with reading and letters. I am specializing in English so I really wanted to see how students react to reading and letters. Pre-k kids aren't exactly open to the idea of sitting down and writing their letters out. I knew since I am with a pre-k class this semester that doing an activity with reading would be hard, but actually just today I got to do an activity with letters. In this activity I worked with 3 students who are struggling with letter recognition. I found it interesting that these students could spell and write their name correctly in order. However, when I asked them to name the same letters in their name just in a different order, it was an impossible task for them. I also got to see how pre-k students handle not wanting to do something you ask them to. They just sit and stair at you.
- I haven't made a lot of changes to my plan so far, just changing some dates around. I am at my PDS school on a Monday and so far there have been two days where I wasn't able to go for a holiday and an ISE day. I have made pretty good progress on my plan and only have a few activities that I need to complete before the semester ends. In all honesty, I haven't looked at my plan once, this is mainly because I write everything down in my planner, when it's due and when I plan on doing it. So making my plan was really just me taking my planner and putting it in a different format that doesn't really work for me. It was a good idea in the sense that it really made me think about the whole semester and when I needed to have things done by. My progress with my plan overall has been good, I just don't look at it very often since I already have stuff written down in my planner.

Digital Storytelling

Some experiences from my PDS that I may consider using in my digital story would be the experiences I have had with the students and reading. I think reading is one of, if not the most important subjects in school. I worked with the students at my PDS a lot with reading and it was interesting seeing all the different levels of reading. Some ideas from my PDS experiences that I can consider including in my digital story would be how every few weeks in my PDS classroom, my mentor teacher picks a different subject. For example, for the next few weeks my PDS class is working on fairy tales. There are castles set up all around the room, the students have made crowns to wear, and during circle time, the teacher reads a different fairy tale. I could incorporate the weekly/ monthly lessons with the read aloud time and make a digital story about the students' lessons on fairy tales. 

Some stories from my PDS that would be interesting to listen to would be how the students react to their reading levels. I worked with a lower elementary grade last semester where the students were just beginning to read full books on their own. Some students were so far ahead of other students it was amazing to me. Some students could read full beginning chapter books, and others were struggling so much with the books that had three words on a page. I found it frustrating when I was working with these students that one student would take 2 minutes to read a book, and others I would sit there and help them sound out every word until they got it. Interesting events and details make a good story. 

Using different multimedia to enhance telling a story to a listener is a great idea because the listener can actually see what is going on. They can picture it for themselves, and it also may have more on an impact on the listener if they can see what you see.