Month: February 2019

I have to say that I was blown away by all that VMFA has to offer for student groups and teachers.  First of all, I had no idea they had the start space and interactive art area of the ground floor level.  I have been to VMFA many times and I have never seen it. My favorite part of the tour was the interactive room.  I was excited to see the multilingual touch board, the tablets with headphones for the visually impaired, and the magnetic shape wall.  I appreciate all that they offer for children and adults.

I enjoyed the open-ended discussion based around the art pieces on the second floor.  I think as adults we are inclined to answer logically, so it seemed like we had trouble making imaginative guesses or “wonderings” about the pieces.  I think the variety of art pieces we viewed and talked about gave me even more insight into how to lead discussion about primary sources in my own classroom.

I was also very excited to experience the mock distance learning class.  This program makes the museum so much more accessible for students.  Thinking forward as a teacher, this distance learning opportunity is not an alternative in the case that funds are hard to come by for a field trip.  Maggie had a purposeful plan, and her questions were open-ended and though provoking.

I felt like I learned a lot of valuable information form the ‘good versus bad’ assessment lesson.  I am a very visual person so it was helpful to me to have a solid, hard copy of good and bad assessment tools.  I have always struggled in school when it comes to taking tests and learning how important it is to create an effective, clear, and straightforward test is very useful to know moving forward as a teacher.  I always caught on to weird wording and over-thought at least half of my test questions convinced they were either just poorly written or meant to be a trick.

I am still a little confused about what I read in chapter 10 of the textbook.  I feel much more connected to the ideas of different assessments after the activities in class, but terms like rubric and criteria and performance-based and project-based still have me a bit confused.  I also struggle with what traditional assessments are appropriate and effective and also just how to make a clear rubric.  I assume many skills will come with time and experience, but I and currently at a loss for how I am supposed to formulate criteria to relay to students.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Harriet Tubman activity in class tonight.  When we were given the rate your knowledge sheet, I felt almost like our lesson was backwards in a sense.  I liked the lesson that we participated in as well as the one we observed in the video because it seemed so different than the social studies lessons I was used to in school.  I think it was very useful discussing the vocabulary of the lesson prior to diving into the meat of the topic.  Front loading is so important!  I was intrigued when each group was asked to pick three words that best fit together and each group picked different words.  Overall, the timeline of the lesson was really interesting and new to me but it flowed really well.  The progression from the vocabulary to discussion to the reading was really fluid and even helped boost my knowledge of the subject!  It was also nice to be able to see a teacher actively teaching the lesson.

 

 

I enjoyed the literature circles again this week.  To elaborate on what I said last week about seeing how literature circles can be beneficial to students, I think having students act in the different roles each week will allow them to constantly see the book in a different way.  So for a personal example, I was the setting and summary specialist last week.  I had to identify all the characters as they were introduced and interpret their role in the story.  Then I had to create a timeline from the information given and record how long the expedition was and where they landed throughout.  This made the fictional story more real to me.  This week I was the discussion director.  The other members of my group went before me, so we had mostly discussed the week’s reading already.  I was nice to wrap up by asking questions that we hadn’t thought about and interpreting our reading.  Literature circle discussion really gives the story more depth and value when students are able to reflect and even add new perspective to the mix.

During our continued work with primary sources this week, I was pleasantly surprised to get to work with the authentic materials from the envelopes!  Like I have mentioned before, my family is big into history and collecting artifacts.  I have grown up around my grandfather’s collection of civil war memorabilia (guns, bullets, confederate soldier belt buckles, etc) and I have visitied countless forts and historical sites around the country.  My point is, the fact that we used real pictures and authentic papers really was meaningful to me.  There is a whole new level of interest when students are able to see and handle materials or even go to a museum and experience history first-hand.