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...