Required Summer Blog #2

Summer school seems to be an overwhelming success for the one student in our classroom. She excels at just about everything that is given to her, and sometimes it makes us as teachers wonder how in the world she ended up in summer school. In particular, there is one lesson that I taught that seemed to be most successful. We were discussing the body systems and Ms. Mathis had just finished a great lesson on the excretory system. Our student, MM, did an excellent job and we had drawn an outline of her body on a long piece of butcher paper and were drawing all of the organ systems on it. My lesson was to focus on the circulatory system. We identified the organs and other things involved in the circulatory system and were in the process of tracing the flow of blood throughout the body. MM was having a difficult time understanding how oxygen-rich blood left the heart and oxygen-poor blood came back into the heart. I then related to her an analogy. I told her to imagine that the heart is the North Pole and Santa is the blood. When Santa leaves the North Pole, he carries lots of toys. He then travels through the whole world and distributes the toys and returns to the North Pole with no toys. Blood leaves the heart with lots of oxygen and then distributes it to the rest of the body and returns to the heart with no oxygen. MM suddenly came alive and took charge of the lesson, explaining everything else to me without any prompting. It seemed as if a huge barrier was lifted once she understood the way the heart pumped the blood and she took off. I can assume that this took place because the analogy made the function of the heart clear and gave her the confidence that was necessary to take hold of the rest of the lesson by the proverbial horns and flourish. Another possibility for her success is the fact that she is the only student in the class and it forces her to pay attention to what is going on in class. I really think that was the reason she failed...she lost interest and quit paying attention.

The lesson that was least successful was a lesson dealing with DNA. She was out of it and I was out of it and it ended in pretty much a train wreck. Being a Spanish teacher by trade, science was sort of out of my element and I hadn’t studied DNA since my freshman year of high school. The lesson tanked because I had no idea what I was saying and she was sick and wanting to go home and go to sleep. Sometimes things just happen.

I feel that my instructional procedures are pretty good. I feel like I can relate to my students very well and choose procedures that engage them and bring the material to life in a refreshing way.

Differential instruction is pretty much a non-factor when there is only one student. I don’t have to appeal to the different learning styles with only one student in the class. However, I do mix things up with her. We’ve done some hands-on activities as well as just taking notes from the overhead. If she seems confused I make up a story to tie it all together. It just seems to flow.

My lessons would improve and the students’ achievement would increase if I had a better knowledge and understanding of the material. In a Spanish class, I like to think that I’m always two or three steps ahead of the students, but in a science class, it could be a dead heat at times. Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

Required Summer Blog #1

Going into this year's summer school in Holly Springs, I had grandiose ideas of teaching brilliant (at least not failing) students concepts outside of the required elements that they normally saw within the typical classroom curriculum. Teaching enrichment would give me the latitude and freedom to teach things that I found fun and interesting as well as challenging to the students. In developing the ideas for the summer curriculum, I came up with two major objectives that I wanted the students to be able to complete. The first was that I wanted the students to be able to go completely through the writing process and create a research projet from scratch. This would include doing all of the research, especially determining the validity of sources from the Internet. After doing the research they would organize their ideas into an outline and then write a rough draft based on the outline they developed from their research. Finally, they would revise the rough draft into a final copy.

The second main objective that I wanted the students to complete was reading a novel from start to finish and identify the themes, symbols, and other literary devices that they could find. I chose for the students to read Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" for several reasons. First of all, it was short. Around one hundred twenty pages long, the novel is of sufficient length to cover enough of the literary techniques that I want students to learn while still being manageable enough to finish in a short time frame.

After those two objectives the lessons were pretty open. I did not want to plan too many activities before getting to know the students better to understand what THEY were interested in. The benefit of teaching enrichment is that there are no specified objectives that MUST be completed; we were working with a pretty good amount of freedom. I had some lessons that played to my strengths, such as basic Spanish lessons that ranged from simple vocabulary to introductory cultural lessons. I also was planning on incorporating simple journalistic skills such as writing style for newspapers and how to conduct interviews. These skills would be challenging to the students, primarily because they had probably never studied them before, but would still be interesting despite the challenge.

Another objective was to introduce the students to Sudoku puzzles. This came as a suggestion from a student that took the enrichment class last year. He suggested this because he said it challenged him to think critically about a subject while being fun at the same time. He said that he barely recognized the fact that he was learning while he was completing the puzzles but the critical thinking skills came in handy during his ACT test and throughout his senior year.

I feel that these goals will help the students progress and teach them skills that can carry over into many different subjects in their academic career. For most of these students enrichment would be the only place where they are truly challenged and they need to be pushed. I feel that the lessons I developed would challenge them in ways that they may never had been challenged before.

As far as inductive learning strategies, I was able to incorporate the "concept formation model" into one of the Spanish lesson plans. The objective of the lesson was for the students to name the Spanish-speaking countries of the world. In this lesson I would ask the students to name as many countries of the world as they could. After listing the countries on the board, I would then ask the students to group the countries in the way they best saw fit. The goal would be to get them to divide the countries by the language the residents of the country spoke and after they grouped them in their way I would ask them to explain the rationale for their groups. If the countries were not grouped in the way I was looking for I would ask them if they could think of another way to group and guide them towards my answer.

Sadly, none of these ideas will be taught this summer...nobody signed up for my class and now I'm teaching science...