Sunday, September 9, 2012
Kim's Week 1 Initial Post
I think that I am the most confident in generating creative ideas for projects and activities for the students to do in and out of class. The only dilemma I see is that I’m not sure how much of that I will be able to do with them while covering all of the necessary standards for fifth grade language arts. Also, we are only allotted a fifty minute period of time per day for language arts to cover reading, writing and spelling, and if we want time for recess, that comes out of the language arts block, so I’m not sure how much time there will be in the schedule for any large creative projects. The only way that I can even imagine asking students to do any large creative project would be to ask them to do them outside of school. Also that places the assumption that every student can afford the materials needed for the projects and I know based on what I’ve seen during the past week, that some of our students are less fortunate than others and we might need to take that into consideration when assigning creative projects. How do we as teachers add in creative projects (not just in language arts) into our curricula without making those less fortunate students feel bad that they aren't able to create as extravagant of projects as some of the other students?
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Kim, As to the creative projects I was talking with a student's parent at curriculum night and she asked about poster board. I was going to take to my MT about this and see if we can get some poster board for kids that need it. I agree that coming up with creative projects is going to be difficult with our 50 minutes. I was wondering if we could some how come up with projects that cover more than just language arts, so that we can use time in say social studies, math or science for students to develop their literacy skills. Literacy cross-cuts every single subject and therefore I think we could have projects that cross subjects.
ReplyDeleteFor me I think my dilemma will be how to run a language arts program day-to-day while keeping up the tempo (i.e myself or the students losing interest). My MT has been teaching for 37 years when I observe her it seems as if she is seemlessly teaching. I need to sit down with her and ask her to walk me through how she creates her lessons. I definitly think that my MT's language arts curriculum has become hybridized over the years as she has worked through things, taking out the bad and adding the new. I see that I really going to have sit down with her and have her layout her plans and show me how she alligns her lessons with the GLECs/Common Core.
I definitely agree with Abby about integrating other subjects into language arts projects. Every class requires writing, so it is important for students to see the connections across subject areas. By creating, say a social studies project that also required a written portion, the problem of not enough time for language arts can be somewhat solved.
ReplyDeleteI feel that when it comes to languae arts instruction I have two dilemmas. One being that I feel that in the teacher education program, we have not had a lot of practive with literacy instruction. In strategies that work it talks about fostering passion and curiousity and also combining explicit instruction with informal instruction to help a childs literacy. These all sound like great ways to teach literacy. However, the effectiveness of my ability to implement these strategies suffers due to lack of opputunities to practice and gain experience leading up to the internship year. The second dilemma I have is my abilty to hybridize a classroom. My MT made it very clear the first day that he implements the curriculum, but also throws his own ideas about what is important. Sometime he makes a professional judgement and decides not to cover a certain topic in as muc depth as the curriculum wanted, in favor of covering a topic he felt was more important. As an intern and new teacher int he coming years, I feel that this may be risky when trying to keep a job at a school. I am wondering how to hybridize a classroom these next few years without taking too much risk with losing a job.