Angel0621's Weblog

End of the Semester Project

angel0621 — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:39:40 +0000

I am looking forward to the presentations for this class. I know that my group have been trying to find interesting things that we could do to present the book in a fun way to the class. I think the problem is we had too many ideas and not enough book and or time to fit it all in. When we start to think about the ideas we picked, new ideas come up and we end up changing our minds. I think we have a firm start on the project now though. It is going to be great! I think that this is a great thing to introduce to students. It gives them a chance to be creative and work in groups and start socializing. I know that this is something I want to introduce to my students when I have my own classroom!

Literature Circle Presentations

angel0621 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:57:52 +0000

I don’t know about the rest of you but I think that literature circle presentations are a great way to get exposure to many different types of books. I think these presentations will give us the jist of the book so that if we think it is something we would like, we could buy it oursleves. I have never done a literature circle before so this is a completely new experience for me. I liked all the different ideas that Ms. Marlow gave us to. i think it helped get our minds working and we even came up with our own ideas that kinda branched off the ideas she gave us. I think with my book, The Glass Castle, a presentation is the best way to break the book down. A book report would simply not do it for the viewer. My book has a lot of scenes in it that are rather graphic so my group thought it would be best to do a skit of some of those scenes. I dont want to say much more and give it away but it ought to be a interesting one to say the least. I think I would definately use this idea in my own classroom. I like how it gives the students a chance to work with each other and become social. It also allows them to use their creativity to express the book and how they felt about the book. I cant wait to see all the presentations! Im sure they will be great!

Lives on the Boundary

angel0621 — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:26:08 +0000

I don’t know about any of you guys but I was more than a little nervous about beginning to read this book, Lives on the Boundary. After the last book I thought that maybe it was going to be set up the same way. Once I started reading it still didnt really grab my attention. Once I got into the story of his life though it got more and more interesting. I started to compare his life with my own life throughout high school. I really had the opportunity to do this when we had to do our freewrite for class. So far I think the book is very interesting. As I was reading it I thought to myself how amazing it was for one person to write a book talking about education when they clearly were not very educated in school themselves. It wasn’t until after class on Wednesday that I started to think about how biased I was being. Just because a person was in a vo tech program didnt mean that they were dumb and couldnt hadle the “real” work. I should have thought about this since I was in a type of vo tech program myself. I think that if this book does nothing else for me, which I’m sure it will, I will have become a better person because of the book and the fact that I learned to pat closer attention to the assumptions I make. This is something that will be very important when i become a teacher. I can’t wait to continue reading and find out what the rest of the book is about!

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

angel0621 — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:05:04 +0000

I know what most of us think when we hear this title, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ”This book is so confusing!” This book was definately not an “easy” read by any means but if we take the time to think about the content we will understand why this book is so important. This book is especially important for those of us who are going on to be teachers. If you read the examples of the banking model you can begin to understand how this might happen in a classroom. Have you ever gone into a classroom and did nothing but talk at the students? I know this is something I have done, especially in th beginning of my studies. I thought to myself that this is something that isnt fun but i thought this was how things were suppossed to be run. The child was the one I gave the information to and they just sit there and take it in. This isnt an interesting way to learn and lets face it, are any of them actually listening? What needs to happen in the classroom is similar to what happens in our english class. Allow the students to have a chance to talk, let them work in groups, let them teach each other! Take some time to step back and observe and watch all of your hard work pay off. This is one way that I will use what I learned in pedagogy of the oppressed in my own classroom one day! If you take the time to think about the book, you will find lots of things you can use as well!

Literature Circles

angel0621 — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:48:45 +0000

As you all know this week was our first literature circle. I don’t know about all of you but I think our literature circle went great! It gave all of us an opportunity to talk about a part of the book we might have found interesting or in the case of my book, The Glass Castle, disturbing. Once we started with one part of the book we couldnt stop. One section related to another section that sparked our interest and we broke down the first 100 pages or so quicker than any other I have ever done. It was alot of fun to do this literature circle. I have never done one before but I have learned all about them in the many education classes I have taken. I found that literature circle allowed even the quiet people in the class the opportunity to talk. It was a comfortable situation where you didnt feel like you would be criticized for something you said. If it went this well for college students, I started to think how beneficial it would be for school age students. Many times in a classroom you walk in and ask a question and the room is silent, yes, even in a college class. This can be scary for a teacher. You had this whole lesson planned out and it requires the participation of the students and they are all of a sudden mute. With the literature circles, the students feel comfortable sharing their opinions because they are in a small group and it gives you a chance as a teacher to walk around and monitor the progress of the groups. Another plus for literature circles in an elementary classroom would be the fact that they get to pick their book (within certain restrictions). The students are at the age where everyone is telling them what to do and when to do it. If you give them some choices, they are likely to participate more in further activities. I found a website that links you to different website that shows you what a literature circle should look like in an elementary classroom. I lot of them are great so check them out! For all the future teachers out their, seriously consider doing this in your classroom!

Post on reading

angel0621 — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:35:05 +0000

The reading assignment for this week was very interesting to me! I never thought about the type of reading that is required on a website. I know when I read things on websites I only look for the key words. That is the beauty of researching things on the internet for me. Once I read this article I began to think about what I do when I read blogs. Blogs I tend to read entirely because its a different typeof text. Its more interesting and not in a research format. Since I am becoming a teacher I would definately consider doing this in my classroom. It would give my students a chance to learn a different type of reading as well as communicating with each other about ideas in the classroom. People in the outside world dont really understand how much of a benefit blogging can be if they havent tried it before. I never knew the benefits it could have until I started college. The more people that include this is their classroom the better in my opinion.

Teaching The Giver

angel0621 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:35:14 +0000

The Giver was a book that compacted a lot of stuff into a small book. To a person who was not thinking critically about the book they would say, “What the heck was that alla bout?” This is something that I said when I first started to read the book. A world were everybody was the same and nobody felt love or pain? That was impossible! After I got through reading the book however I started to think about the meaning of the book and realized this would be an awesome book for children who were old enough to understand the context.

If I were to teach this book to my class of, lets say seventh graders, I could just see the confusion on their face now. My class periods would be filled with, “What is he talking about?”, and “Are you serious?” The real meaning of the book would never be seen. Before we started the book a pre-activity would have to be done.

I found a great lesson plan on the theory link website. On this website it says to have the students develop their own “perfect community.” I would ask them to give their community all the aspects of a regular community making sure that the rules were made clear to the citizens if this community were to ever exist. I would then ask the students to share their ideas with each other and we would make a chart on the board of all the sililarities and differences. We would then take a vote on what we wanted in our own classroom community. I would post this “community” on the board and we would reference it often throughout the reading of the book.

This is a difficult book to read even if you are capable of understanding the meaning, so a pre-activity would be vital to their success.

Post # 2

angel0621 — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:27:53 +0000

When I started to read The Giver by Lois Lowry, I expected it to be a book about someone who was known for giving people gifts in the community. I expected it to be a happy book that would give me some encouragement about people doing some good deeds. I expected the giver to visit all the families in the town and he would be a well known and loved figure. When I started to get into the book however, this was not the case. It took awhile to find out who The Giver was first of all. I never imagined it would take that long for the character to be introduced. After we met him, it was unclear what his job was. After finding out what his job was, shock ran through my head. How could this person be so secretive? Why is he the only one who holds all these memories? Once I heard all these details I had to change the way I was thinking and start to look at the charcater from a different perspective in order to get the full meaning of the text. I can’t wait to finish it and find out what happens!

angel0621 — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:54:21 +0000

Part 1

While browsing through the site I found many different entries that were interesting. The blog that interested me the most dealt with the recent issue on the recall of Mattel products. In Samad’s Blog, he discusses two different websites that both provide information on this topic. One is The Washington Post, which most of us are familar with and the other is Parent Wonder, which is an independent site. Samad explains that although both sites provide information, the Parent Wonder site gives info that somebody who might be affected by this recall might want to know. This site provides a link so that you can fill out the appropriate paperwork. The Washington Post site does not do this for the reader. Overall the Parent Wonder site makes answers more accessible to the average reader.

Part 2

Many people today do not consider themselves to be living “the good life.” Life has far too many stressors and there isnt enough time to think abour much else then what is expected of you. An article that I read today gave you an idea of what you can do that might seem a little odd. This idea is hynosis. A quote from the article titled, “The Good Life-Wealth, Prosperity, and Abundance” states:

Most of us think of hypnosis as a stage act or some form of entertainment where someone swings a watch in front of your eyes and you go into some kind of “trance”, but did you know that you could use hypnosis to bring about positive changes in your life? Hypnosis is very much like meditation. Some people use it to relax. You can also use hypnosis to become more focused, more creative, lose weight, stop smoking, become more confident, sleep better, stop nail biting, cure difficulties in personal relationships, find a soulmate, etc.

This passage is saying that hypnosis is something that is beneficial and has more than one function. Hypnosis, according to this passage, has the power to do some truly amazing things. The positive changes that could be made in your life are overwhelming and you think to yourself, “why wouldnt I want to try this?” The fact is hypnosis is not for everyone. If you dont believe that this will work, it wont. It depends on your attitude. So does it have anything to do with hypnosis at all?

Hello world!

angel0621 — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:35:02 +0000

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