Happy Meal commercial.

I think the Happy Meal commercial was some that would be very beneficial for my students. That is something I could show them and they could see the many shots that it takes to make a commercial. Also it is something that would connect to their lives, so they might be more likely to want to learn from it or to be interested in what I am talking about when it has to deal with a McDonald commercial than if I showed them something that they could not connect with. Also if I had them make a video with the toys from the happy meals I think the kids would love that! it also teaches them about gender roles and how those gender roles can be broken.

Literacy Moves On - Chapters 1-5

The first chapter focused on Multimodal texts which I found very interesting since that is really what we were working on with at MRP pieces. This allowed the students and the reader of the MRP papers to look beyond just the research and see the deeper elements that are going on in the topica t hand. This really helped me to see that students might learn more from more indepth complicated assigments instead of just having them do worksheets and answer questions that are not critical thinking. It would probably benefit my students and much more if we looked at the deeper meaning behind what we are learning instead of just skimming the stop and staying on the surface of what we are trying to learn which I think really takes place quite often.

Literacy Moves On- Chapters 6-10

This read was interesting to me because my mom and I use to collect beanie babies. and it talked about the beanie baby fad. This was interesting to me because I think that my students would really like to learn about things like this in the classroom. Learning through beanie babies!? How fun! I would have loved to look at the beanie baby fad when i was a student and try to find out why this fad happened and what the marketers did to make this such a big deal! I fell for it hook line and sinker because I have a closet of over 1000 beanie babies that are now worthless. So even now as an adult I would like to take a look at this and see how they made simple stuffed animals worth so much!

MRP Reflection

I think that I learned a lot from the MRP. I would definitely do these with my students in my classrooms. It was very helpful to see all of these from the same research topic because it helps you to get the whole story about the topic that you researched. Children would love to do this because it could be about something that interested them. They could then look at all the aspects that are involved in their topic and make a very detailed project that they can show to other people. It can also help other people see their research better than just a paper because that can get boring, but the way we presented the MRP would interesting people and make them want to see your reasearch and learn about your topic.

SeedFolk.

I think that Seedfolk was a very interesting book. It was very cool to see how all of these characters from different backgrounds were tied together through this simple garden. It brought a whole community together, and this community was so diverse and so different from each other that it was amazing that something so simple could bring them together. And also once it brought them together it seemed that many of them were sort of embarrassed that they were not friends before this. There are many things with diversity, culture, and community that my students could learn from this book. Even though it is sort of a complex read it is all a very short and easy read. I feel like the fact that it is an easy read helps with the underlying complexitiy of the story and that my students could learn from this book very easily. I am totally putting it in my list of books to introduce to children in my future classroom.

donut shop Literacy

This was amazing! I was really impressed by the things that we come up with today in class that had to do with this donut shop literacy. we took only a short amount of time to come up with something and they were so great! I cant imagine if you gave kids a longer amount of time to work on them, what they could come up with! It would be extraordinary! We did an advertisement and it was so much fun and it was very valuable to try to think about what an advertiser is doing when they put an ad together. I will probably never take an ad at face value again. I will probably always study it and wonder what they are trying to get me to buy and what marketing they used to go about trying to get me to buy it!

Research topic for my MRP paper.

I think that I am going to do my research paper on censorship in the classroom. I think that this is something that is a real issue and effects many classrooms. I was in a classroom when I was in the 5th grade that wanted to read the Giver. Many parents were up in arms about how this book was not appropriate and talked about things that we should not know at that age. My mom signed off on a permission slip saying that I was allowed to read the book. I got to go into a special room with 5 other students parents who let them read it as well and we read the book and discussed it. I learned so much from this book and it is still sitting on my book shelf this very day. I felt that my parents trusted me and my teacher to present this book in a good way and to learn from it. I feel that censorship is a very important topic that I would love to research about.

chapter 10,11, &12

I think that conferencing between a student and teacher is very important. It is beneficial to both teacher and student. You get to spend one on one time with students and you get a chance to let them know that you read their writing thoroughly. As the teacher you can point out crafts that they do well and encourage them to keep it up, also you can point out areas where they might need a little help. This gives both student and teacher a very concrete plan in helping the student with their writing. Also if you write this all down on a sheet of paper it can serve as a reminder to them as to what they need to work on, so they know the goal they are working toward and they can be held accountable. Also parents can see this sheet and maybe help their child improve on their weaknesses and tighten their strengths.

When it comes to assessing students work, I think this get tricky. I wouldn't want them to see their assessment and feel down about their work and maybe get discouraged. The rubrics were interesting to me. I think that they might be a hindrance when it comes to writing. I feel like there may not be a reason to grade students writings. Maybe you could use DOL and other daily things to grade and check if students know their grammar and punctuation, but not what a student has written. I think there is nothing wrong with looking at a child's writing and pointing out some mistakes but to put points and a grade to a students writing seems like it would only cause student to get discouraged. So I would have conferences and point out what they could change and what they did well, but I probably would have a lot of problems putting a letter grades to a students writing.

Chapter 7,8, and 9,

I thought the most important thing in the chapter were the two questions to ask yourself before you start a lesson. What exactly am I teaching and Why am I teaching this? How will it help my students as writers. I am sure that if you as a teacher cannot answer these questions of your lesson, then your students for sure will not know what you are teaching or why you are trying to teach it to them. I have had students go through a whole lesson and then say "What are we doing this?" to the teacher and it seems like that would be the most important thing is to make sure that what you are teaching is relevant and that your students know why you are teaching it.

I think the way that I see a lot of teaching model writing is to model it through published Literature. I think this is a great way! Kids love books and if you can give them a good example then they will see the connection faster that just standing up in front of the class and trying to explain it without help from a book that they kids can connect with.

I think a writing conference is an amazing thing for teachers to do with their students. I had a teacher that did these, and I always liked the one on one time and it made me feel like the teacher was actually caring what I was writing about and I could bounce idea of of her or she could share writing strategies with me. It kept me more engaged in my writing and allowed for me to get another point of view so that I could strengthen my writing skills.

I think the special craft of using brand names, peoples names, and using as to connect sound to a visual are really important to good writing. It can give the reader a better visual of what you are trying to explain. If you say you are going to the store, the reader can picture any store, if you say you are going to an Old Navy, then anyone who knows what an old navy looks like, or any one who has been into an Old Navy can picture that in their head and get a much clearer vision of what you are explaining in your story without having to describe what the store looks like or what type of product the store might carry.

That's all for now!

Erin

Chapter 4 and 5

the five senses in writing was most interesting to me. I never thought about teaching your student's the write the 5 senses in. A story is really a great story when you can see the story in your head, but it is an amazing story when you can get all 5 senses. I never thought that maybe a student might have to be taught to add sounds etc. into their story. It makes for a more enjoyable and helps the story come alive. Many children has their own feelings into stories because children are very much ego centric when story telling, but to be able to add someone else's feelings into a story, or to explain their own feelings more deeply would make the story more likely to connect with the reader. This is some thing that is important that we try to teach children how to go about finding the feelings of themselves and others in their stories and then finding a way to write them down.

In chapter 5 for me it just reinforced the importance of teaching children correct punctuation and grammar. I think what I learned most from this chapter and in class is that you can be a little forgiving of mistakes in the younger grades because you don't want to just mark up their papers and discourage them from writing. So while these things are important it is probably best to wait until a later years in elementary school to be overly critical of grammar and punctuation.

Wilde article.

This article was very interesting. The man thing that caught my attention was when they were talking about the little girl who had the word "Sister" but had spelled it so far off from the actually word that she could not find it in the dictionary. I had this trouble all the time as a kid. Some one would say "Look it up in a dictionary" and then I would get so frustrated and overwhelmed by the fact that I could not find the word in the dictionary. So in fact the dictionary method did not work at all for me! I remember being so frustrated when some one would say that to me because I knew that I wasn't going to ever learn how to spell the word because I couldn't find it!

Another thing that I found interesting was writing the word down spelled wrong even though you know its wrong because you just wanted to get it out on paper to remind you later of whatever you had written down. I do this so many times in notes for class. You are trying to move along quickly and fill out notes that when you come to word that you cant think of the spelling right away you just write done something close and move on so you can keep up. I also hate when some one asks me for my notes for a class they missed because my spelling is usually so horrible in them that I am ashamed to let them see it!

Another thing that I found interesting is that the author said that learning to spell correctly was not for the teacher who was grading it, or for the writer themselves, but for the reader. I never really thought of it that way, but it is true. I, as the person that wrote it can read it, even with wrong spelling and not skip a beat, and the teacher is reading it critically and slowly to find errors, but a reader is just trying to enjoy the story and should not be held up by your spelling errors. That is very interesting to me because i never looked at it that way before!

Erin

Coffee Shop Dig

I think that most of the converstation at the coffee shop was casual and fun. This seemed to be pretty much the autmosphere...casual. It seems even people there on business were there to keep the business on a casual level and not a serious level.

• There were two girls talking about a guy and his kissing technique. I think that one girl was telling the other girl that he was a bad kisser in order to mark her territory, as in "I kissed him, so you should stay away" I don't think it had anything to do with if the kiss was good or bad.
  
• I'm not sure this is what she was thinking but if it were my friend and I didn't care I would have just kept my mouth shut. I got the feeling that she wanted this "friend" to know that she had kissed him and it was best that she not do the same.
• to the right was some products for you to buy, then the register in the middle and then the station to add extras to your coffee or grab a napkin were to the left. I think that the products are to the left so while you wait to place your order you might be tempted to buy something. Then while you wait for your coffee to be made you can grab napkins at the station or the pamphlets that they had for you too read. the bathroom was towards the back, I think they do that so that if you need to use the restroom you are more likely to feel like you need to buy something because you have to come all the way into the store. then there are chairs and couches and tables in the front of the store where there are floor to ceiling windows so that you can look out at the street and people can easily look into the shop and see yummy coffe!

I think all of these things because I use to work at a store and we used many of these same techniques in hoping that people would come in and spend money. Some of these things I dont know at all, I am just making assumptions. I have never read anything that supports my interpretation, but I am sure that if I looked around on the internet for a whileI could find some sort of info to support my hypothesis.

First Blog.

This article was interesting. It was basically about introducing students to blogs and technology and the road block that come along with using blogs in the classroom. The students used the blogs as a chatroom of sorts at first because they did not understand the true meaning of a blog. Once they got the hang of it though, the students love it and it worked great when corresponding with the older students. Then when an administrator thought that a child gave away too much information about their personal life on their blog the school decided to not allow the blogs. Reverting back to pen and paper was very difficult for the students and one child even said that they thought they had lost thier voice. It cocludes with the fact that online blogging is almost expected in the future for classroom use. It seems to be a very practical and effiencent way to share ideas and points of views.