Children's Books as Movies: Where is the imagination going?

One of the big reasons why I want to work with older elementary students is because they read and interact with many different types of literature. I am especially excited about working with novels with my students. The ability to read a longer story and get to know the characters and the setting in such a deeper way makes the reading experience that much more exciting. I spend most of my free reading time these days reading novels suitable for this age group. Percy Jackson and the Olympians was the most recent of these books that I have completed. I honestly feel like I learned more about the Greek Gods and Goddesses through this book than I did during high school! The book was engaging and made my imagination run wild!
When I sit in my fourth grade placement class during reading time and watch students delves into The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Tale of Despereaux, Harry Potter and Tuck Everlasting, it makes me excited to see them enthralled by great literature that can span generations. I think that these books are great opportunities for parents and children to love literature together!
But here in lies the problem. More and more of these books are being turned into major motion picture events. I just saw the preview for The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Movie. One of the greatest things about reading is that you can tell the story in your imagination. Based on the authors descriptions, you can make the characters look like anyone you want, the locations are your own and you can create a movie in your mind that is all your own. Now, with more of these books actually being made into movies, children have a cast designated for them. They can see someone's vision of Hogwarts castle or Depereaux's dungeon and are shown a casting director's image of Winnie Foster and Greg Heffley.
Does this kill the imagination for these young readers? Are they still able to make their own movies or has that thrilled been taken away from them? I know that for myself, after watching a movie I see the movie characters as I read. Edward Cullen will forever take the form of Robert Pattinson no matter how hard I try to revert back to my image of the breath taking vampire from the Twilight Saga. Don't get me wrong, I have seen all of the Twilight movies and I am very excited to see the final installment of Harry Potter, but I had already completed all of the books before ever seeing these imposed images in my personal movies.
I worry that by taking so many books that are intended for young readers and making them into movies we are taking away a great experience from students. Will the Wimpy Kid series hold the same fascination for the next generation of young reader when they are able to get the movies from NetFlix? Will they have the same enjoyment I see my fourth grade boys get right now reading the series? I never think that the movie is ever as good as the book. The experience is just not the same. I worry that future generations will not experience laying in bed with a flashlight trying to read the last few chapters of a great book because they know they can just rent it this weekend.
I am all for a good movie, but I wish that some things were left to my own imagination.

Creating Social Scientists

On the first day of my last six weeks summer session I entered my class on integrating social studies and the arts and I was really excited. I loved social studies as a kid! I had a great teacher convince me that history was like a mystery and that anyone who wanted to be an archeologist could be just by asking questions and looking for answers. I was never very good with names and dates, but I loved the idea of uncovering history. I was shocked to find out during that first class how many people had bad experiences during social studies! So many people in class said that they either had no real memories of their social studies classes or they thought it was boring and uneventful. This discussion made my realize that it was going to be very important for me to pass my love for social studies onto my students.
Throughout the six weeks session I have learned the importance of creating relevance during social studies instruction by integrating the content strands including geography, history, civics and economics into other subjects like language arts, science, math and the arts. For some students, this makes the topics more relevant and, in our day of EOGs, gives more time for these important topics.
I have also learned the importance of making these subjects come to life for students like my teacher did for me. This takes planning and creativity that moves students out of their textbooks and outdated videos and into a place where they can find relevance between social studies and their lives. I think this means that teachers need to take the time to get to know their students' interests and hobbies and find ways to help students see that people in the past and in other areas of the world had similar interests and hobbies.
Since I decided that I wanted to become a teacher, teaching social studies is one of the things that I have been the most excited about. It is also one of the main reasons that I want to teach fourth grade. The history of North Carolina is really interesting to me and I look forward to sharing that interest with my students. These past six weeks have done nothing but strengthen my excitement about teaching social studies and I am looking forward to incorporating some of the new ideas that I have gained from this class and from my textbooks and research.

Adventures in the Blogging World

I started a personal blog a few years to talk about what was going on in my life. It was my own little piece of the world where I could share anything I wanted. It was an extension of the journals that I kept as a teenager and the personal conversations and monologues that I have in my car. When I was given the assignment to create an education blog during summer school I thought that it would be much more difficult than my personal blog. This blog should sound more "professional" was my first thought. How could I take my personal writing style and make it sound like a graduate student? I was worried that I would not be able to get the same thoughts and emotions through if I knew that it was part of an assignment. (I never even thought that anyone was actually reading my personal blog). Once I created my first post I realized that I was being given the opportunity to show myself that my own personal feelings and experiences are "professional" enough. My thoughts and ideas about education are being molded through each of my assignments and experiences. Blogging is just another extension to these learning experiences. I have been given the opportunity to practice expressing these ideas through my blog. It has been a great experience and I will definitely continue using this blog as a forum for my educational experiences, opinions and ideas. I have learned that even if I am only writing for my eyes that the process helps me think about what I have learned and a great place just to vent.
I would love to use blogging as an assignment option for my students one day. I know that it would have some complications that needed to be worked out involving privacy issues, but it would be an interesting learning experience for my students.
The only part of this assignment that in any way hindered my learning was the fact that I did not have time to read everyone's blogs regularly. I hope to be able catch up on some of that reading during my break. I don't think that is much of a hindrance, more like a lost opportunity.

I still have one question to answer for my final blog post assignment, but I think it deserves its own post, so you can find that info in the other post from today.

Point of View and Perspective

After a recent assignment for my Social Studies and the Arts class, I have a new idea about the perspectives of children. This assignment consisted of me interviewing 2 fourth grade students about their knowledge of geography, history, civics and economics. The types of answers I received were a direct example of the old saying "from the mouths of babes". Did you know that what the president does everyday is attend a lot of boring meetings and writes a lot of papers? Or that our current president is McCain Obama? I sure didn't! But where did they get these ideas? McCain Obama makes me think that when this student was in the second grade during our last election she saw all sorts of advertisements and news items that said both of those names together. I could see that deduction being made. And we see all sorts of pictures of presidents, past and present, sitting a a desk looking at papers. These two observations make sense to me and definitely to an 8 year old. When asked what a judge does, one student told me that she thinks a judges job is to decide where a child goes when parents get a divorce. I would bet that this little girl has seen this first hand. Their answers to these questions were all a matter of perspective. How are they seeing the world at 8?
Sometimes I wish I had the perspective of child. They take almost everything at face value and don't read into every single thing that happens like I am sometimes guilty of doing (ok...more than sometimes). Their point of view as a child molds their learning and needs to also mold my teaching. By broadening their horizons I can help them shed new light on various issues and ideas through the lens of a child.
I think the students that have the hands down advantage on their creative and unique point of view and perspective are those of English Language Learners. They have experience the world in a way that I can not even imagine. Many of them coming to this country at an age that still allows them to have memories of their homeland and typically in a community with other people from the same ethnic background while being exposed to everything "American" in the public schools. These are students we need to draw on for cultural experiences and alternative points of view in our lessons. How are elections done where they come from? What are holidays like? What is the weather like? How is this word pronounced in Spanish/Portuguese/Gujarati/Gaelic/German? These students bring a whole different perspective on the world than most native born Americans can never fully understand. It is important to take advantage of this within the classroom and look at their ESL status as a resource as opposed to something that we must work against.
I believe that as we learn and grow we are able to look at things through multiple points of view. I can observe as a woman, a southerner, a North Carolinian, a Christian, a married woman, a daughter, and now I will be adding to that list an educator. I want to help my students understand how to view things through their own point of view and also appreciate others in a caring learning environment.

What Should They Miss?

I was saddened to hear about a new policy at the elementary school I am currently interning at for the new school year. Most students that receive special services for ESL, learning disabilities, speech and OT are pulled out of the classroom during the day. Some of them are pulled out just once, some for longer periods of time, depending on their personal needs. Up until this year, students were pulled out for special help usually around the time during the day that the subject they needed help in was taking place in the classroom. Since reading, writing and math all take up more than one period each day, students would be pulled during part of one of these sections so they never missed the entire lesson/unit. Well, not anymore. Now, all students must be pulled during the social studies/science block of the day. Every student is pulled in the morning (for the 4th grade) and this is supposed to coincided with the social studies block because the administration has let the teachers know that it is less important than the other subjects and since it is not tested on, students are better served to miss these lessons. This makes me so angry! First of all, I never experienced pull-out this way in elementary school because I attended a magnet school with electives. I was able to spend 2 periods a day in CA with my special ed teacher and never miss a single minute of classroom instruction. Was this the best way? No. I would have loved to take some more fun electives sometimes, but I was able to choose one each semester so that was better than nothing. Would it have been better for me to miss L.A. everyday in my regular classroom since that is the main area where I needed assistance? No. I benefited from spending time the the classroom with my peers. Is there any perfect way to help these students get all of the help they need each day without missing out on something? No. BUT why do they have to miss out on two subjects that could be very successful for them and that could help engage them in something that can lead to success? My teacher is working with the special educators as much as she can to ensure her few students who are being pulled out can still participate in social studies by working to help prepare activities and lessons for her students to work on in their special education classroom, but with this set up, they will miss out on so much. I just wish that administrators and those involved in making decisions like this could understand that students with learning disabilities need to have as many opportunities within the day to feel successful and just like every other student. When a student with a learning disability hears that it is time for reading or math, the subject in which they have a disability, they can easily feel discouraged before the lesson even begins. But, you tell them it is social studies and you just happen to work in reading, writing and math, then you can help students succeed in ways they never felt was possible. This is a great reason to utilize integrated lessons, but it is still excluding students from activities every day that they should not have to miss. I hope that this new policy will encourage teachers to work social studies and science into the other times within their day and that the administration realizes that it is unfair to exclude students from any chances to work with their peers in the classroom.

What is the question?

During school, we are used to being asked questions, but are they the right questions? As I continue my study of Backwards Design as a way to plan instruction, I am realizing how important it is to ask the right questions. I do not mean asking questions like "What is 8+6?" or "Who invented electricity?" I mean deep, thought provoking questions that do not necessarily have right or wrong answers and might not have any answers at all. These are questions like "How do our personal experiences mold the way we look at a piece of art or literature?" or "How is life similar and different for children in North Carolina through history?" These types of questions are considered essential questions and need to be established before you can plan a successful instructional plan.

So my textbook includes the question that many teachers are asking, "If the textbook contains the answers, then what are the questions?" How do we help our students go beyond the surface information that is provided as facts in their books to look at the big picture and transfer that information to relevant questions? I think my first answer to the question posed in my book is who says the textbook contains ALL the answers? Yes, the textbook gives the facts and information needed to formulate some of the answers, but we need to branch out and provide information from as many sources as possible. My second response is that it is not just the responsibility of the teacher to ask all of the questions. As I am formulating the essential questions for my upcoming social studies unit, I am realizing that I want to help my students learn how to ask these types of questions for themselves. If they get used to looking into the information to find out how it relates and what it really tells us, then hopefully as they go through school they can look at the information they are learning through that type of lens. How and why is this information important and how does it fit in with everything else I know? Those should be the true questions.

Priorities

I am currently attempting to tackle the idea of Backward Design as a way of lesson planning. The general idea is that you begin with the outcomes you want (what should the students learn) and then decide what they need to show you to prove they have actually learned what you wanted (essentially, assessment). Not until those things are nailed down do you ever actually come up with the lessons and activities. It is a new way of looking at education for me, and even though it is very different, I am starting to understand the true value.

As I am reading about this style of teaching and planning, the idea of true understanding has come into play. What does it really mean to understand something and how do we prove that in the real world. In the book I am reading, Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, I am beginning to understand how important it is to set your priorities as a teacher. We look at a school calendar and see all of these blank days to fill, but when compared to the actual amount of information to cover, there can never be enough time! Wiggins and McTighe remind us that "teachers can only help students learn a relatively small number of ideas, examples, facts, and skills in the entire field of study; so we need to help them transfer their inherently limited learning to many other settings, issues , and problems" (40). WOW! This is a huge task and really makes me rethink my ideas of learning and understanding. We want to be able to delve deep into ideas and then be able to apply those ideas to many different situations, not just cover as many ideas as time will allow. Think Depth not Width....a river perhaps.

Yes, it is important for my students to be able to label the parts of a life cycle, but it is even more important that they are able to take the whole idea of a life cycle and apply it to other concepts and ideas over time. Am I really teaching them the vocabulary and reading skills, or am I making sure they can take those skills along with them through life and apply them to the newspaper and a job application as well as their fourth grade textbooks.

I have always accepted that my chosen field of profession holds a great deal of responsibility...shaping the lives of children and the future as so many people have said in the past, but now I can really see that the actual information is not as important as each students ability to really understand and apply the learned information to as many different examples and situations as possible. I think that the authors of my textbook have done a great job of explaining how that is added to my list of responsibilities.