Goodbye Art, Hello Fifth Grade

Less than one month until I hold my first Back to School night in my first real contracted classroom as a full-time elementary teacher. I can't say the process was easy and without tears, but my husband quoted what my friend Robyn always said, "It will all work out." I got my dream job: teaching civil war, poetry, geology, novels, etc. in my neighborhood school. I learned so much teaching art part-time this spring and will appreciate much more not having to drag my supplies up the ramp in the snow to my portable! Brace yourselves, kids at Nibley Elementary, we are in for an exciting adventure!

Meeting Fablehaven's Brandon Mull

Beside the stump, dressed in crude rags, sat a wiry old woman gnawing at a knot in a bristly rope. Shriveled with age, she clutched the rope in bony hands with knobby knuckles. Her long, white hair was matted and had a sickly yellowish tint. One of her filmy eyes was terribly bloodshot. She was missing teeth, and there was blood on the knot she was chewing, apparently from her gums. Her pale arms, bare almost to the shoulder, were thin and wrinkled, with faint blue veins and a few purple scabs.

I used this creepy descriptive writing excerpt from Fablehaven a year before I actually read the entire book. A third grader named Dylan in my class was crazy about the hag named Muriel tied up in an old shack (she graces the cover of Book 1). In true Harry Potter style, the Fablehaven books hook young readers with fantastical plots, lovable characters, and settings you always wished to find in your own grandparents' back yard.

My own grandma Genevieve lived alone in a large house at the base of Mt. Olympus in Salt Lake. Off the back porch was a winding pathway that led zigzag, zigzag steeply down to a . . . you'll just have to guess. My brothers and I would play under a large evergreen tree whose roots were more exposed than buried. We sometimes created scenarios of armies of Hobbit-ish ogres living inside it and constructed protective fortresses in the bushes closer to the house.

Back to my story. Fablehaven's author, Brandon Mull, visited the school where I was student teaching and I, along with other young fans eager to buy his autographed books, was able to meet him. During his speech to the student body, he encouraged active imaginations of fearless writers who will create tomorrow's stories. Write, write, write and read, read, read. Then (this part was for me), SHARE, SHARE, SHARE.

Opera for Children

What brought thirty 4th-grade boys and girls (and three teachers) to school on a Saturday morning to sew glittery fish scales, assemble fish fry dinner plates, decorate sheet cakes, and paint bakery window displays? Would you believe me if I said, "OPERA"? What if I added that these same students had written the plot and lyrics themselves?! I was invited as one of the school art specialists to help with Opera Scenery Day.

Mrs. Anderson, the classroom teacher, has oodles to say about this experience. The students work through the writing process, setting it to a musical score, singing and staging production numbers, designing concept sketches for the props and scenery, and performing in front of their peers and families. I was honored to be a small part in this process and look forward to implementing some kind of similar program in my own classroom someday.

"eARTh"

Earth Art. From Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza to Utah's own Spiral Jetty, artists have been using materials in nature for millenia to tell stories and understand the world. Celebrating Earth Day with Kindergarteners today reminded me of the peaceful experience I had at this Evening for Educators workshop at Snow College where I worked with lichen-y bark, pea gravel, pine cones, and one of my best friends. Amberly discovered how to harness the light shining through the hole in the bark as the center of her starburst of seed whirligigs. She definitely has an artistic eye.

Being an art teacher at River Heights Elementary for almost five months has forced me to learn to trust my own artistic eye and "dig into" the skills that make art ART. We realized that each small group of artists at the workshop employed color, repetition, line, texture, etc. and we could find similarities between them all. I envy Amberly's talents every time I read the children's books we have written and illustrated together or look at her paintings; what I am learning, though, is that the more I learn about art, the better my artistic attempts are. My job is to teach children that there is an artist inside each one of them. Hearing students that used to say "But it isn't good," or "I'm just not an artist" instead say "Look at what I did!" is my reward.

Technology for Teachers Wrap-up

This course had forced me to face my fears about technology in the classroom; there are so many options available if the classroom has the hardware and Internet connections in place. I had my share of frustrations and computer-induced brickwalls (like this afternoon when my name and account at QuestGarden was deleted) but I also feel like I can talk techno-speak better than I could back in August when this course began. My blog was a great forum for me to get my thoughts out of my head and I liked the lesson plan possibilities I explored (as surfer and creator). It gives me courage to play more with my new laptop and become more familiar with the tools that can be an asset to me if I give them a chance.

WebQuest Lesson Plan: Aloha Hawaii

Check out our social studies lesson titled "Aloha Hawaii" for 5th graders at
http://questgarden.com/73/92/1/081121075235/index.htm

My friends Lyn Manning and Kelli Valdez and I compiled a fun lesson for 5th grade students to learn about Hawaii using the WebQuest site. It is a jigsaw activity where first the students research websites on their assigned topic (climate and geography and tourist attractions were mine, as well as the teacher resources section on student created sites on geography), then they are reassigned with TOPIC EXPERTS from other groups to create a travel brochure. On presentation day the students board a plane, listen to ukelele music and hear climate & geography information as they fly into the airport. The tourist attraction group then shares favorite sites to visit, ambassadors greet and share state history and state symbols. Then they enjoy a luau to appreciate the Hawaiian culture, and on the return trip the students as an extension activity make a postcard of their favorite parts of the adventure.

We spent five separate occasions (several hours) together setting up our accounts, sharing websites, refining the process and tasks, refining and changing links some more, and getting it ready to post. We got nervous when the grade level measurement feature was high (due to word volume on a page?) and tried to whittle down our text where we could without sacrificing web links. This afternoon as we pushed the Publish button (after Kelli lost her hula links and other frustrations when we were trying to add things to the lesson from different computers at the same time), my name was dropped from the lesson entirely. None of us knew what we had done to bring that about and were unsuccessful at trying to get my name as collaborating author back on the lesson plan. This project reminds me that I am a digital immigrant who is trying to use cool new techno-gadgets but ends up IN TEARS when it does something I don't even know how to fix.

I enjoyed viewing other lessons on WebQuest and will try to find ways to utilize these interactive lessons in my classroom. I enjoyed especially my surfing for tourist sites and volcano sites; I really liked finding the student authored sites about natural disasters, pele, and wayfinding. I'm sure students would be interested in exploring these as extensions to the lesson we created, and then create their own about features here in Cache Valley.

My favorite part about this activity was working with two women I admire. They are moms like me with chaotic lives (you wouldn't believe if I told you) and still manage to be at the top of the class in an extremely competitive group of courses. I learned a lot working with them about making our lesson language appropriate for our target audience and how to find "gif" sites for animated cliparts (we loved but couldn't get to work on our lesson pages). Group projects really are a way for students to teach each other and pool talents and expertise to produce a meaningful end product.

Interactive on-line tutor

I got to be an elementary school student this morning learning about cause-and-effect sentences and order of operations math concepts using interactive computer lessons. The lessons were
www.create.usu.edu/practice_reading/reading.cfm and
www.create.usu.edu/practice_open/numberoperations.cfm
In the reading lesson I chose to work with the female (classmates said to avoid the robot persona) taking about preparing to run a marathon. She "stood" at the left side of each screen teaching me about what a cause is, what an effect is, and how they work together in sentences using clue words like "because" or "so". Just last week in my 5th grade practicum class we did boring worksheets about this very topic, and judging from their enthusiasm for interactive math lessons, I'm sure they would have learned just as much and had more FUN logging on to this lesson. I noticed as I was the student that this experience with the personal tutor would have caught more of the individual problems and questions certain students had (they have learned that if they just keep looking down at their worksheet someone else will provide the answer out loud or they can make a guess in the blank and get SOME points). This program makes you get it right before you can move on. I liked the audio that had a 5th grade female student's voice and the "hip" comments like "You're awesome!" that is great for making the student stay motivated and optimistic about learning the topic.

The math lesson was really boring and over-kill on the problems. I chose as my persona a Hispanic female and that was cool because she had an accent when she talked. I didn't like that I didn't have a scratchpad to do the complicated math problems (I'm not very great at calculating in my head!) but I did like that often she connected math knowledge to real-life applications ("go goggle to see how knowing math helps you get a good job"). I didn't know until much later that I could click to skip through the instruction screens; I would've done that sooner. I think students would want a shorter chunk of lessons because my brain got tired after a while.

I think this could be an effective extension of class work but I'm not sure I'd use these online tutors to teach the concepts. My post-test scores didn't show improvement and I didn't feel a greater love for math because of playing math games online. My practicum experience in 5th grade showed me that students love to use interactive games but consider them as games: I could see some of the boys from my class not taking this very seriously without some accountability (post-test scores for grades, for example). When I got some answers wrong (according to the computer) I didn't know why: the computer just made me "stab at the dark" again until I got the math problem right or the right wording of sentences.