Month: March 2019

I think the presentations have gone well for the first two groups who have presented. One takeaway from this weeks group for me was how they didn’t split the speaking parts in half where one person did their part then the other went. I like how they continued to go back and forth through the whole presentation. I think it makes the presentation more interesting to not listen to the same person for an extended period of time. I think Jennifer and I will follow their lead.

The conversation about bias in children’s books is always a very eye-opening, educational time in these classes. I want to focus on the Presidents birthday cake book we talked about. Stating the obvious, we all know that slavery was horrific and never should have taken place like it did. That being said, I still wonder about the bias part of the book (or any book) that depicts African Americans being happy and shown with smiles. We all know that there is no person that wants to be enslaved, but my question would be, if you put yourself in that time period the way it was and you were a slave and head chef for GW, I would assume that his life as a slave was much better than that of a slave who worked under the hot sun all day for someone that was not as prestigious as GW. Would I be completely out of line in saying that the chef and his family could have been happy/happier living with GW and clearly doing something that he might enjoy and is good at such as being a chef? It sounded like he was well known and well taken care of due to his talents even though he was a slave. I guess my point would be, just because an African American is smiling in a book during that time period, should it not be considered just because of that?

The lesson plan activity in working with a classmate was a great way to go about addressing concern with the lesson plans. We have gotten halfway to three-forths of the way completed and we have already learned a few things from each other about how to start the plan and how we can change things to make it ours. I am looking forward to see how different our plan is from others and what kind of tidbits I can pick up from other classmates that will help me be successful going forward.

The time spent talking about the lesson plans was well needed  and greatly appreciated. During my time at UR, there have been several lesson plan templates and different expectations. Some did not need/require specific detail which is what I was mostly lacking in my plan. I will be revising my plan to re-submit this weekend. The three column rubric also helps in knowing what you guys are looking for. This is my favorite kind of rubric. I plan on using this type of rubric through my teaching career.

I enjoyed the gallery walk activity (as seen in my lesson plan) but would have never thought about using that activity to do a picture walk through a book. While I love how we are doing activities in class that we can then take and use in our own classrooms, the fact that these activities can be used across several content areas will be most beneficial to me. I can see me using this activity to introduce many units across contents.

I can understand how the closing activity we did can be very beneficial to the teacher. It is a great way to see what the students learned along with what questions students may have. It seems to be very similar to an exit ticket. I need to start incorporating these kind of exercises in my closure part of my lesson plans. I noticed a teacher that had several different types of exit tickets on her desk when I was in her classroom this week. I meant to take a picture of them to have than as examples to use in the future but forgot to do so. I wonder if there is specific places to search for exit tickets and/or other exercises to use for closure.

 

It is always good to see examples of using a lesson or experience across content areas. I did not think this way while at the museum but after seeing the poem Dr. Stohr-Hunt wrote about the camel was a great reminder to always think across content when thinking about what your doing or what you want to do.

With the completion of literature circles this week, our group enjoyed the aspect of reading the fiction book followed by the non-fiction. I liked how Out of the Dust gave me a view of life during the Dust bowl time period and then I got the actual facts afterward with the Dust Bowl. It’s a good way to have students make connections between the two, understand the life and times of the period, and I think using this format in the schools will help students pull the meat out of what I will be asking them to learn in a fun manner.

Differentiation has always been an issue for me when doing lesson plans but I feel like the discussion tonight may have help me overcome the troubles I have had with it. Specifically when it was said that it is not for the content but how you access the content and/or how can you change the end product makes perfect sense. I’m not sure I was always focusing on how to change the content but putting my focus on how to assess the content and the end product will hopefully have me focused on the right area and allow me to come up with material easier than I have before.

Our guest gave a great presentation on how they performed the DBQ. The resources they shared for finding information will be useful, even the twitter info. I am not on twitter but will think about signing up to be able to get more resources. Sometimes I wonder if their is such a thing as too many resources. Having so much to choose from can be as detrimental as not having enough resources. However, after creating the last lesson plan for class, I was looking at many resources and could not find anything that jumped out at me. I was able to find something after searching for a very long time of course but I was searching the same resources for the most part. So,  I will be expanding my resources from now on anytime the present themselves. Another one is Pintrest. I did sign up for that in a previous class but have not used it enough to where I am comfortable with the app and finding material on there but will add that to my rotation to search for items going forward.