Tater Salad’s Blog

I feel that the resources and materials found during this course will be very helpful for me when I start teaching.  Not only do I have the sites and lesson plans that I found myself, but I also have access to quick summaries from my peers so I can see if I think the lessons and resources they found will be helpful to me.  Throughout the semester I have found numerous activites, materials and lesson plans that will really help me in my future classroom.  It’s really nice that all of this information is out on the Internet and on some you can see success rates and how students responded to certain parts of the assignments. 

I really like the Read, Write, Think site along with Reading Comprehension Strategies, Vocabulary University and TeacherTube.com.  These websites have a lot to offer to an English teacher, but they also reach out to touch other subjects and offer useful lessons and activities for numerous subjects.  I will definitelycontinue to search the Internet for valuable resources for my classroom.

I think I will continue with my blog, or at least start my own classroom blog.  I feel that it’s a good way to keep a discussion going outside of the classroom so that students can keep their minds on the track they were on in class so that if they didn’t get to say something they can post it before they forget and if need be, it can be revisited in class.  Having my own personal blog though could be a great way to interact with other teachers and share ideas quickly.

http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=398

This lesson plan is a fabulous way to let students get to know authors whose works they’ll be reading.  The plan says that students will research an American author and keep research logs and K-W-L charts on the information they acquire.  The website offers it’s own overview which I feels sums up the lesson really well: “Dramatizing life stories provides students with an engaging way to become more critical readers and researchers. In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines and biopoems about their authors, and then collaborate in teams to design and present a panel presentation where they role-play as their authors. The final project requires each student to synthesize information about his or her author in an essay. Extension activities include writing a formal research paper and reading other works by the selected authors.”

I fell that this activity could also work in a history class where the teacher will be providing historical novels  for assisted reading outside of the traditional textbook.

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/LACIArtIntegrateShakespeareAndNet9.htm

This lesson plan is great for incorporating our students understanding of technology with Shakespeare.  It has pre-reading activities, including Internet research for background knowledge.  During the lesson, students alternate between reading the play at home and acting it out in class.  I really like the idea of students acting out the play simply because that’s the way Shakespeare’s plays were written–to be performed– and I feel students will have an easier time understanding the play if they see it acted out.  Plus, this gives different types of learners a chance to learn their way.  The post-reading activity includes having students create a Hyperstudio (which I’m guessing we’d use PowerPoint now) to create a collective understanding of the play.  This  includes character analysis, plot understanding and literary devices.  The lesson plan also offers other ideas for assessing student understanding such as having students write a paper and then illustrate their essays in some creative fashion for presentation.

For this lesson plan, I can’t think of anything major that I would change.  I like the idea of creating a soundtrack though (an idea that I picked up from another class) because I think it’s a good way to let students bring some of their world into the classroom.  That’s the only thing I can think of to add to this lesson.  It’s very thorough and has some outstanding ideas.

This article was really helpful in seeing how vocabulary extends throughout every subject in schools.  I had no idea that poetry could be used in a math class to learn about angles or anything really!  I also never saw literature circles becoming part of a science class.  The activities offered in the article would be extremely helpful in the classroom as a way to extend our students’ vocabulary and actually have it mean something to them.   This article really opened my eyes to all new ways to involve my students in the classroom and to really have them enjoy it and walk away having actually learned something.

I found this article to be much more interesting than the first article simply because I have done a multigenre paper and it was fascinating for me to see how others responded to this task.  It’s really hard for me to try and summarize this article in a way that will make sense to everyone because my thoughts are so jumbled, but I’m going to give it a go.

I agree that the usual research paper is a dull regurgitation of information that’s already out there for people to find.  My first adaptation of a research paper was in the 12th grade when I was assigned a research project.  It was pretty much like a research paper, but in powerpoint form which was not terribly interesting either.  On page 529, Moulton writes “At the same time, they still taught research and documentation skills,” which I think is a very important point.  In our world of technology, students are claiming to not understand what is and isn’t plagarism.  I feel it’s extremely important as teachers to have a plagarism workshop of sorts so that we can make sure our students understand when to cite a source.  I would even go so far as making them sign a contract stating that they understood plagarism, this way, if an issue arises later in the year, we could just pull out that contract and there would be no argument.  Also, with seemingly infinite information on the Internet, it’s important to teach our students how to identify reliable information.

I liked the point Moulton made about multigenre papers requiring “that the student think about what has been researched and interpret it from the subject’s point of view or the point of view of others from that time period.”  The multigenre paper really gives students a chance to activate their imaginations and really involve themselves in the novel, character, etc that they’ve chosen to focus on. The reflection papers at the end of the assessment is a wonderful idea, I think, because it allows students to reflect on the project and say what they like and didn’t like which provides excellent feedback for the teacher for future reference.

It appears that the endnotes are what really qualify this paper/project as research.  The endnotes are what allows this paper to take the lace of a traditional research paper.  It’s the way that the teacher assess the depth and quality of the students’ research to let the teacher know just how hard the student really tried to understand the novel, character, etc.

I think that bringing everyday writing into the classroom for a huge final paper is exciting.  The students know how to write letters, directions, instructions, newspaper articles, etc. and this multigenre paper really lets them experiment with different styles and different ways of presenting an interpretation of a text or person. “Unlike the traditional reserach paper, it encourages teachers to teach students to think about what they’ve learned from their research and to make use of what they already know about different genres of writing.”

Thinking Questions:

1.  What do you guys think about using 8 genres? I personally feel that it’s too much for high school students (I’m thinking more along 4 or 5) but what do you all think?

2.  How would you, as a teacher, decifer and explain the difference in genres to your students?

3.  In high school (and middle school maybe) do you guys think it would be better to offer students some structure? For instance, have students pick a novel that was read during the semester or assign an individual research novel to each student (to insure variety of projects) and have them take on a character from the novel? This way, when writing a rationale for the assignment, you could relate it to the semester’s work.

In the beginning of the article, Kucan states that “writing in response to reading can deepen and extend the dialogue between a reader and a text.”  I could not agree more with this statement.  Writing something down is an excellent way to think through your thoughts fully and understand an idea more completely.  Right after this, Kucan eludes to what I interpreted as reader response papers which I feel is an amazing way to get students to think through the text and comment on what they liked, didn’t like, thought about the characters, etc. I really liked the idea of pre-reading activities because my teachers rarely, if ever (I can’t really remember), did this for my classes.  There were lots of post-reading assessments, but hardly ever pre-reading assignments to let us familiarize ourselves with the text.  I also liked that there was a format offered for the “I” poems because I think they could be helpful for students, much like myself, who can’t even fathom where to begin when it comes to poetry.  I thought the ending line of the article was really important to point out the need for reading activities of any kind, so I’ll repeat it for you guys.

“Inviting and supporting students in writing “I” poems is one way to help students to begin noticing who characters are, why they feel and act as they do, and how they see things; to begin noticing what places are like and what makes one place different from another; and to begin noticing the impact of the carefully chosen and placed word.”

Thinking Questions:

1.  “In writing such a poem, students become the narrator, expressing thoughts and feelings from the narrator’s point of view.” –  Before this statement, the article related the message  (from my understanding) that the speaker and the writer were the same person.  However, when I was in late middle school and high school, I was told that this wasn’t necessarily the case. So when is the appropriate time to help students understand that writer and speaker aren’t always the same?

2.  As I said earlier in the summary, I like offering a format for students to get them started on the “I” poems, but (especially for students like me who don’t know where to begin with poetry) would anyone else think that this could offer a way for students to write poetry without having to think too hard about it?

3.  “…a notion supported by Wilson and Ball’s  (1996) suggestion that teacher educators ‘teach prospective teachers as they would have them teach.’” — If you teach a college student like an elementary student, won’t the college student become bored?

Your Name: Sarah Horne

Name of Strategy: Root Word Puzzle

Source (Where did this come from?): Vocabulary University

Link to the Strategy:
http://www.vocabulary.com/index.php?dir=puzzles&file=attempt_puzzles&level_id=61

Give a thorough description of the strategy and how it will be implemented. This should be a summary of the strategy according to the original source:

Students are taught the origin of root words from Greek/Latin languages in order to be able to decipher meanings in words they may not recognize. This activity gives clues to the real word and provides the root word that has been learned. The students can fill in the blanks on the Internet or you can print off sheets.

Explain what part of the standard course of study is addressed by this activity.

This activity falls under the Grammar and Language Usage section of the standard course of study (students should be able to use Standard English for clarity, technical language for specificity, and informal usage for effect). It also helps to prepare students for the SAT.

Explain why you think this strategy will work. How does the strategy help your students learn?

I think this strategy will work because it makes learning root words a little more fun. I’m a verbal learner (see Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences) and so I’m good with puzzles, but this website offers numerous activities so that you can teach all of your students the same thing in a way that reaches out to the individual.

Your Name: Sarah Horne

Name of Strategy: Persuasion Map

Source (Where did this come from?): Graphic Organizers

Link to the Strategy:
http://www.eduplace.com/graphicorganizer/pdf/persuasion.pdf

Give a thorough description of the strategy and how it will be implemented. This should be a summary of the strategy according to the original source:

This map would be very effective in teaching students how to organize and write a persuasive paper to be used during the learning phase. The students are to write their goal (pro or con whatever) in the first box. Then the first box is connected to three other boxes and each one of those should contain a reason why the student is pro or con. In turn, each reason has two boxes that should contain facts or examples to support their reasoning.

Explain what part of the standard course of study is addressed by this activity.

This activity addresses the argumentative writing aspect of the standard course of study.

Explain why you think this strategy will work. How does the strategy help your students learn?

I think this strategy will work because it lays out a simple plan to follow to organize a student’s thoughts and papers when they are first starting out. After the general concept is understood, then emphasis can be made that the five-paragraph essay isn’t the only way to write a paper.

Your Name: Sarah Horne

Name of Strategy: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Source (Where did this come from?): Teaching Resources for High School Link to the Strategy: http://www.ushmm.org/

Give a thorough description of the strategy and how it will be implemented. This should be a summary of the strategy according to the original source: This is a website dedicated to everything Holocaust which is addressed in the English classroom in the 10th grade. This website didn’t have a specific laid-out plan on how to use it in the classroom, but just letting students explore it or giving them a structured guide yourself would be enough. I would use this for a pre-reading exercise before I introduced a book like Night or Survival in Auschwitz so that my students would have a deeper meaning of the Holocaust, other than a lot of Jews died, before we started exploring the horrors of people who have actually lived through it.

Explain what part of the standard course of study is addressed by this activity. This activity addresses a bullet under the literature standard (knowing about others, their experiences, and their ideas through literature and literary responses).

Explain why you think this strategy will work. How does the strategy help your students learn? By using this activity, my students will have a thorough understanding of the Holocaust before we read about it. I think this activity will help my students better understand what the victims were going through and sympathize more with the author/character in the stories rather than just viewing it as some novel their being forced to read. I really think this website would help to interest them before we read which will help them to comprehend the text better.

Your Name: Sarah Horne

Name of Strategy: Motivating yourself

Source (Where did this come from?): Study Guides and Strategies

Link to the Strategy: http://www.studygs.net/motivation/index.htm

Give a thorough description of the strategy and how it will be implemented. This should be a summary of the strategy according to the original source: This is a pre-reading activity that students will fill out online. The strategy is to get students to realize why they learn things easier than others and what they can do to learn everything so well. It gives them questions to explain based on their own thoughts and scenarios to think about and examples on how to handle penalties. It really explains to students how to be proactive and also how to positively react to negative situations.

Explain what part of the standard course of study is addressed by this activity. This activity can help students to understand a strand of the literature standard (knowing about self, concentrating on how and why one personally responds to literary texts). By understanding how they learn and how to motivate themselves to learn, students can better understand themselves and how to understand literature. I feel that doing this activity at the beginning of the year would be very beneficial in the development of classroom discussions later.

Explain why you think this strategy will work. How does the strategy help your students learn? I think this strategy will really help students to see how to turn negative things into positive outcomes. It also helps them to see what motivates them and if I learn some of the ways they like to learn or what they like to learn about, then I can hopefully find some way to bring these things into the classroom which will help them learn as well.