Subject Matters Chapter 10 Response

I actually really found this chapter to be very interesting and relevant to every content area, but especially in math and science. Inquiry is something that we talk a lot about in our science courses. When you think about it, science as a subject or field of study wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for inquiry. Scientists of the past, present, and future ask questions about the things occurring around them, do research on these topics, and then reach conclusions and share them with others. So, in our science courses, shouldn’t we be teaching our students in the same sort of manner? As mentioned in the chapter, as well as in our ESCI 4440 course, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) really places a heavy emphasis on student inquiry and investigation. By asking their own questions, doing meaningful research, and immersing themselves in new knowledge, our students are essentially scientists! So what better way to learn, understand, and appreciate science than by inquiry investigation?

But inquiry is also relevant in other content areas, like my primary content area mathematics. I really love the ideas discussed on page 262-263 about students having a curiosity about their parent’s incomes and expenses, and then performing budgeting plans using multiple sources such as the newspaper, IRS forms, and real bills. After calculating their expenses, students will come away with a better understanding about income and about how expensive today’s luxuries are! 

I think application activities like these are so much more impactful and memorable to students, especially when the students are the ones leading the inquiry and conversations. I really look to incorporate as many of these inquiry activities as possible when I am an educator someday.

279

Emily 

Lit Circle Podcast: An Abundance of Katherines

Strategy Lesson (Multicolumn Notes) Reflection

Overall, I think that my Strategy Lesson presentation went really well! I think my PowerPoint was informative, yet not super long and boring. I know what it’s like to have to sit and watch a super boring PowerPoint, so I tried to throw in a few pop culture references and gifs here and there to keep everyone's attention.

Even Kylo Ren liked my presentation!

The most challenging part about my Strategy Lesson was trying to explain the many different variations of the strategy. The text defines multicolumn notes as being a 2-column system (one for summarizing, then one for reflecting), yet it also said that most teachers use 3 columns. On top of that, teachers have so many different ways to label and organize their multicolumn notes. But I think I ended up covering many of the variations pretty well, and made sure to mention ideas for each content area.

Me, when I realized I forgot to do the last column lol

Also, I think I demonstrated the multicolumn notes strategy pretty well. After spending hours trying to find a grade-level appropriate text for the strategy, I settled on a passage about the Water Cycle. I felt really confident that the multicolumn notes would be an effective during-reading strategy for this text, and it seemed to work out really well in class. If there’s anything I could improve on from my demonstration/modeling, I would have asked my classmates to show their notes from the reading under the document camera (like I did) so that we could have seen how everyone fills them out differently. Also, I made the mistake of skipping the “Reflections/Questions” Column during my modeling, so I had to improvise and do the questions and reflections at the end of the presentation instead. Next time, I would do them as I read like I was supposed to!



291

Emily 

Synthesis 2

From the past few chapter of Subjects Matter, the topics that have stood out the most to me are student choice and building a classroom community. While things like textbooks, teaching/learning strategies, and content are all important things to we teachers, sometimes we neglect to think about the things that are important to our students. If everything single thing within our classroom is decided (dare I say dictated) by me, my students are likely going to have little interest and motivation to learn. By not allowing students to make any choices or work collaboratively with their peers, I’m silencing their pursuits of knowledge. As a teacher, my goal should be to give my students as many opportunities as I can to let them to express their choices, creativity, personality, and feelings. This can be as simple as letting students chose what book to read in their book clubs to allowing students to sit wherever they please during class.

Kathleen Ralf, teacher of Humanities & English at Frankfurt International School and also the Global Online Academy, details how to allow more student choice in the classroom in her Edutopia article, “5 Tips for Giving Students Choice That Leads to Student Voice.” Ralf believes students want to show us who they are and what they care about, we’ve just got to give them the freedom and support to do so. Ralf outlines 5 tips to help teachers promote this learning environment: scaffolding various types of projects throughout the semester; making the rubric and the requirements for the project explicit, yet open; give encouragement and support along the way; adjust, bend, and let it flow; and lastly, share their work with the world. I couldn’t agree more with her perspectives, and I truly think that if teachers could give away just little amounts of their control, their students would thrive in the newfound power and responsibility.

Lastly, I also found a super interesting video from Edutopia that discusses the effects of the classroom design and environment on student’s success and interest. The school in this video decided to encourage students to work collaboratively by making classrooms more open and comfortable. I absolutely love this concept. And it's clear that students love it too. 

            


361 (wow, sorry about that...)

Emily

Book Pitch : An Abundance of Katherines

Lexile Level : 890

Pages : 272

Grade Level : 6-8

Content Area : Math 
Awards : 2007 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book, received recognition as one of American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults.

The book that I'd really like for you guys to chose for our book club is An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. Some of you may recognize the brilliant author, John Green, as he is also the author of the wildly popular novels Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. In this other novel of his, a math-child-prodigy named Colin Singleton has a thing for girls named Katherine. The problem is, Katherines don't seem to have a thing for Colin. He's been dumped by 19 girls all sharing the name 'Katherine', spelled exactly the same way. Crazy, right? He thinks so too! So Colin decides to form "the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability," which is a theorem that will be able to predict the future of all of his relationships, transform him into a true genius, and finally win himself a girl! Love, friendship, and (apparently) a dead Astro-Hungarian archduke all add up to create this heart-warming story about reinventing oneself. This novel also incorporates several mathematical concepts and embodies the answer to the question: "when is math ever going to be relevant in real-life?" As a math-lover, this novel just seems really intriguing to me, and I would really love to read it within a book club. 

I think middle school students would also really enjoy this humorous novel, but to really test that, I actually asked some middle school students that I know for their opinons. I gave them a brief synopsis as well as read the first page to them.. and then they gave me their *honest* opinions about the book:




So please consider choosing my novel, An Abundance of Katherines by John Green... I promise you won't regret your choice! ;)

Emily 

Subjects Matter Chapter 9 Response

Chapter nine was dedicated to outlining how to hold the perfect Book Club. Book clubs can be a more entertaining way to get your students reading content-relevant texts of their choice. They’re also pretty cool in that they incorporate both collaborative learning and individual reading.

I’ve been in quite a few book clubs thought my school career, all of which took place in my language arts classes. I distinctly remember enjoying the book clubs that we had in my AP English class in my senior year. Because of the AP test, our goal for the class was to have as many classic novels and their main ideas, motifs, themes, etc. in our repertoires to be able to write about on the test. I recall our first clubs (there were only two clubs due to the small class) forming from our choice between reading either Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte or Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. I’ll be honest here: neither of those was particularly appealing to me. But most of my friends chose Pride and Prejudice so I joined in. Each week, we’d have to read a few chapters or so and use sticky notes to mark imagery, foreshadowing, or other literary elements. Then, we’d hang out and discuss with our group members about what we read. I distinctly recall how my group, of all girls, would discuss the cute moments between Elizabeth and Darcy, and also our frustrations with Lydia’s immaturity. We’d also spend a long time trying to decipher some of the odd, old rhetoric.  

Darcy and Elizabeth are #goals for sure 

My only beef with book clubs is that I don’t understand how they could work in a non-language arts classroom. They could probably work in a social studies classroom, but I just don’t see how I’d be able to fit a book club in or make a book club relevant to my math or science classrooms. I'm hoping that our upcoming book clubs using content-area texts will help me figure that out. 

314

Emily 

Textbook Activity : Emily and Cierra

For our textbook activity, Cierra and I decided to make a flipped-classroom video for review over a specific unit and concept (Unit 5-5 : Adding Fractions).