Art Blog

I would use the artwork Medicine Woman, by Beverly Buchanan, in a science content classroom. The unit I would base around this piece of art would be a recycling and reusing materials unit. The artist created a really amazing piece of art by finding odd materials and old “junk” and sculpting it to be shaped like a person. Beverly uses old cans, bottles, buttons, fabrics, wood, jars, rocks, tape and more. It would be really cool to show kids this piece of art to show them that materials can be reused and recycled to preserve them and create new things. We do not have to just throw things away and pollute the environment more. Instead we can find new uses for them and that is really impactful for kids to see. I would probably assign a project around this artwork and challenge my kids to create their on sculpture of old materials. I would allow them a lot of freedom to create whatever their imagination desired. The goal is to show them that they can use things over and over that are enjoyable for them to see. If i make them create something specific, then they might not enjoy it as much and get as much out of it. I think it would be really cool to see how creative they could get with household items that they would normally consider “junk.”

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Are Book Clubs and Podcasts a Good Idea in the Classroom?

I think book clubs are a really cool idea and reading is so important for students, but I’m not sure that it is ideal for a content area class. I think it might take too long and you would probably need to give students a long time to read the book to help break it down better. I personally think it is a better idea to go through a content related book and find passages/chapters that you as a teacher believe are important and present those in some way. I think this still offers important aspects of reading and will still help students’ reading skills without placing a huge burden on them outside of class and making it seem like busy work. With those passages being read and being talked about in class, I think it would be super cool for students to create a podcast about it in class. It would show their understanding of what they have read and provide insight into what they are thinking about the text provided and what impact it has on them. It is a way for the students to really get involved and make an assignment fun so I think they would be really into it.

Strategy Lesson Reflection

Today, Sam and I presented our strategy lesson on Post-it notes. I think Sam and I co-teach really well together and that showed in our presentation. We fed off of each other’s ideas and comments we made while the other person was presenting felt natural rather than interruptions. I also think we presented the main idea of what Post-it notes could really be used for in the classroom and how to utilize them best for our future students. One thing that could have gone a little better was presenting a more specific thinking strategy for the class to focus on rather than asking them to write down main ideas on their sticky notes. We also probably could have had a class discussion on what students wrote down on their sticky notes rather than transitioning straight into what they thought of the strategy. The last big thing that I think we left out was talking more about the thinking strategies being implemented with the sticky notes even though we briefly discussed it. In the future I would just make sure to be a little more detailed and thorough with the presentation. With that being said, I felt really comfortable in front of the class and I believe Same did as well, which could be seen by our demeanors.

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SciShow

SciShow

For my resource blog this week I chose a channel on YouTube called “SciShow.” This channel is cool because it presents material to students in a fun way. The narrators do not have boring voices which helps kids stay engaged. Also, there are funny animations to keep the video interesting. I think this kind of thing could be used as a supplemental resource and maybe as a review after a unit is finished.

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Content Differentiation

Differentiation in my classroom was not really a thing with the level of content given when I was in school. I am not sure if that is because I was in the gifted program or just because my school did not provide different levels of material within each class. There were however a lot of different types of multimodal differentiation in my classes. In high school we had big econ projects that covered areas such as social studies, math, and ELA. Classes would also switch up the learning by providing different types such as through videos, interactive animations, reading, coloring, writing and so on. That was the biggest thing Dr. Royce asked Ms. Maronpot to work on her classroom. She wanted Ms. Maronpot to work on involving the kids more and having them come up to the board and interact with the material. Lecturing can help some students but hands on and being involved in the learning is vital to others. In my classroom, I would want differentiation to be well-rounded and involve all aspects of it. I would want to provide different levels of the material to help include all students, even the ones that are struggling to learn the material. Then, especially since I want to be a science teacher, I want to provide a lot of different types of hands on learning and self-discovery through labs and projects.

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Video Editing for Beginners

iMovie Basics

I chose a YouTube video that shows how to edit videos on iMovie for my resource blog because I thought it would be cool to have a video concept in my multimodal project idea. I was thinking about using this idea in life science with the biome unit. Students could set up and decorate a small “set” that mimics a certain biome and make a really cool video describing the video. It could go along the lines of being a survival video about the biome. Students could incorporate what the weather is like there, what animals live there, what plants grow there, what kind of shelter they would want to survive there and so on. This would be a really cool project to help the students engage their creative side while still learning valuable information about biomes.

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Chocolate!

Rock Cycle Experiment

Who doesn’t like chocolate? This lab is dedicated to the subject of earth science and using chocolate to show the different kinds of rocks on the earth. This is really cool for content-area literacy because it is really relatable for the kids. They will clearly be able to see the differences in the chocolate and use prior knowledge about chocolate to then make that comparison to rocks on earth and the rock cycle. It also gets the kids engaged with the content which I think is also really important for literacy. I think this would be a super fun experiment to do with students and it would be incredibly beneficial.

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