The End or Beginning?

This will be my last posting for this semester. At first I was not sure what I would say in these blogs but over time I have found them intriguing and thought provoking. Many times when I was having trouble thinking about what I wanted to say about a topic, I would visit other students sights and find a spark that lit my imagination and sent me on my way to critical exploration. Overall, I have enjoyed this process and see this experience as something I will try to continue. So, thank you to all my fellow students in my cohort and to my teachers for lighting the fire that gave me a hot foot! You light my fire!

Blog#5: Points of view through letters in history

A student in one of my social studies class wrote a beautiful letter from an aid station behind the front lines at the Battle of the Somme. The writer was able to draw in my mind a vivid image of the carnage she saw as a nurse helping receive the wounded from the English first attack across No Man's Land. Not only was the letter a great writing prompt but it showed a deep understanding of the subject matter we had just experienced through a creative activity to explain trench warfare. The students wrote letters home after playing a trench warfare simulator game and I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of understanding I was seeing in the students letters. The letters were a good assessment of the student's knowledge but also showed some creative thoughts of different perspectives. There are some very useful strategies in Chapter 9 of Improving Adolescents Literacy and I can see some prompts that can be creatively used in different areas of social studies.

Learning through experience

Today, I witnessed the Battle of the Somme in a Ninth-Grade classroom. The class participated in a re-enactment of trench warfare. The students were divided into three groups, German, French and English as they came into the classroom. My host teacher and I had moved the desks and marked them with a numbering system. The desks were lined up in three tight rows with a large gap in between the two groups, "No Man's Land." At the sound of a whistle, the two sides threw colored paper wads at each other as they sat on the floor and used their desks as a trench system. We had three rounds of two minutes with a ten minute question and answer period in between to resupply the paper ammunition. It was a very enjoyable activity and the students were so enthused that I had to repeat the action with two later classes.
Got a lot of positive feedback and the students had to write a point of view "Letter from the Trenches" to some one at home. All in all it was a great activity and showed a critical understanding of World War I trench life and fighting.

Knowledge Through Visual Information

The power of an image is found in its ability to tell a story without a single letter of text. Visual information can be a support structure for content inquiry and help the student to associate images with complex ideas. When the image is a source of questioning, the use of graphic images can be a source of deeper inquiry. By asking the students to look at an image of an event and asking them what is happening, the student is forced to think of interpretation. The student becomes a history detective and puts into play all the information the student has as background knowledge to develop a visual story from the image given. Even when the interpretation is not correct the student has been acting upon known and inferred knowledge to generate a theory. Then the student can dig deeper to prove or disprove their assumption. This would appear a good strategy for deeper inquiry.

Finding the Sweet Spot

     In reading Readicide, I am always looking for the statement on how to fix the problem. Gallagher speaks of the problem but without some hope of a solution it is too easy to become depressed by the size of the problem. The subhead, "What you can do to prevent Readicide," speaks of finding the sweet spot. This is the same idea of finding the spark to light the creative fuse. Finding the prompter or key to the student desire to read seems to be an individual experience. Every student is different and thus there is not simple way to find the spark or sweet spot that will work for all students. The use of a journal is a possible way to look into the interest of each student to find a subject area that will prompt an interest in reading. Once the teacher can find the students interests, then a list of readings for the student can be presented. If just one of the selected books can be of interest then the student will look for more things by his author or subjects in this area.
     At the beginning of each class term, I think it would be useful to have the students fill out a short survey on themselves showing their interests, hobbies and books they have enjoyed. Even knowing what movies or videos they have enjoyed can give some insight into what may spark their imagination.
    

Reading Aloud Thrill

To me this is a tried and true strategy, which is not used to its fullest at this time of instant gratification. The ability to hear text, poems, or prose read to you gives you deeper meaning to the feel of the text. Some of it is in the way a person speaks or accents the vocabulary. There are so many new words that you hear from some one reading and your understanding of the meaning of those words comes from how they are used in the work. I have always loved hearing poetry spoken and that carries over to books. I have gotten into listening to books on tape in the car as I go places. I love to hear different voices give life to novels and works I may have already read but have new feelings for when I hear new voice speak.

Vocabulary: The paints of the mind's vivid imagination

The readings for the Vocabulary Module make me realize how unfortunate it is that so many students have gotten into the secondary level of school without having enough knowledge of how to decipher and unravel the meanings of words they do not recognize. How few have a working knowledge of dictionaries or thesaurus. Their knowledge of words comes from spoken language in school and at home. Most of the time when they have heard of a word they would not recognize the word in text or can not look up the word in a dictionary because they do not know how to spell it or take apart it's sounds to try to spell it. These same students can decipher a digital apparatus and learn how to operate it less than a day. So the root problem must lie in the manner in which vocabulary words are presented to them. With most learning processes the student must have some ownership and interest in the learning process or they will not even make the effort to learn. This is the question...how to make words interesting?