I can't believe there is only one more week of class until it's finals week. This semester has flown by as they usually do, but when I look back to the beginning of the 15 weeks, it seems so long ago. I feel as though each semester I'm learning more and more information to hopefully become a good teacher someday. I want to take an opportunity now to reflect on my three favorite activities of the semester in Dr. Kist's class.
Strategy Demonstrations: These allowed each of us to come up with a way to help students learn. For example, my strategy demonstration was a literary reduction. Mrs. Cikra used to have us complete these in her class and it always helped me to break down the important parts of a novel and have them displayed on one colorful, informative piece of paper. I decided to show my classmates that strategy because it always helped me as an English student and hopefully they as teachers can use it someday too. Overall, I liked the strategy demonstrations because it gave each of us INLA students a wave of new ideas to use in our classroom.
The Great Gatsby Lesson Idea Wiki: I am so proud of this thing! I spent a lot of time compiling lesson ideas to use with The Great Gatsby, the canonical text I was responsible for reading this semester. Each of us had to complete 20 lesson ideas for each of our canonical texts and then we all put them into a wiki. Now we have access to at least 220 quality ideas to use with 11 different canonical texts. It was a great assignment!
Check out the wiki: http://canonicalideas.pbwiki.com/The+Great+Gatsby,+Julie+Rudlosky
Blog: I'm thrilled to have been introduced to blogging. I never quite understood what it was, it really just seemed like a diary or a journal to me. Now I understand that a blog can be pretty much anything the writer wants it to be. I will definitely use blogs in my classroom because it allows students' creativity to reach all new levels and it will hopefully keep things interesting for my students.
While I enjoyed every activity and assignment in this class, those were my top three favorites.
Like I said, I can't believe this semester is almost over. But now I feel as though I'm even more confident in what I will be doing in my career and I have more ideas than ever!
3 comments:
I can’t believe we have one more week of classes. Where did the time go? January seems like forever ago but I feel like we just started with Dr. Kist. I am really excited to be ending the year because we’ll finally be reaching our goal of student teaching in just a few short months. Julie you are going to be such an awesome teacher. You’ve done an amazing job with each project Dr. Kist has given us. Your strategy demonstration was awesome. The only idea I don’t agree with you on is the wiki. I’m not a big fan of it, probably because I never quite figured out how to work it. Alyssa I think hates me because every time she would post something on our Weetzie Bat wiki, somehow I would delete all her work. This blog idea is really fun though. I’m having a hard time finding time to blog, but I love doing it and I also like reading everyone else’s. Good post Julie!
I agree, I cannot at all believe that this semester is almost over. I remember Taryn and you and me standing outside before class every day complaining about how this semester seemed to be dragging on forever and now it is SO close to being over!
I agree that the canonical wikis are going to be the most helpful tool ever when we start teaching. There are so many ideas on that wiki that will help us when we get thrown some "exciting" text to teach like the Canterbury Tales or something. Kist's class has been so helpful. I can't wait to incorporate the things he showed us into my own classroom.
I know what you mean... it seems that time is both speeding up and slowing down as we move along in our degree; speeding up so the semester flies by, but slowing down so when we look back, it seems like we had ages to learn all that we did! I think the activities were a great help too, I can't wait to get to use them in a real setting!
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