Week 4

This morning I had my second field experience! I really like my teacher and my students and I think I will learn a lot from them! One thing that is kind of frustrating to me is the meetings before and after the field experience. I wish that this was time that I could be spending in the classroom instead of going over the syllabus, readings, and note taking. Maybe since it is only the second week of field experience, these meeting will get better as the weeks pass. Today in my classroom, the students continued their work for their "Invention Convention." The students perform research in the computer lab to find out more about an item we use in the present. The students then find out information on this items past and then they predict what the future of this item will be. I am in a 5th and 6th grade combined class and the knowledge that these students possess impress me every time I come in! I am excited to see what the next few weeks will bring.

In E339 today we first read Up, Up, Down by Robert Munsch. This was a great participatory book that had all of the students involved in the reading. I think this would be a good book for my future classroom. Also in class we did a punctuation mini lesson. It was good to see how the different punctuation was used in different books, but I felt like the activity was a little easy for me. I think this lesson could have been accomplished much faster with just a brief overview of punctuation.

In small groups we also presented our Craft Lessons lesson. It was good to hear what other people had come up with. One idea I particularly liked what the "grab bag" idea. In this activity students draw an object from a bag/box at random and then have to write about this object in creative ways. I thought this was a fun idea for students. My activity dealt with teaching students about dialogue and learning about speech bubbles. For this activity, I took a simple book that did not involve dialogue and put a post-it note by a person's mouth and then wrote a speech bubble and filled it with text that I thought the person might be saying. I thought this would be a great activity for younger children as well.

At the end of class we read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss. I found this book to be very comical. The author writes two sentences the exact same way, except the punctuation is changed so the meaning of the sentence is changed. This is something I would love to use in my punctuation unit with my class!