Thursday 2/11 Reflection

There are a variety of strategies that were used in class today that I really enjoyed that I could find useful in developing community and are effective teaching methods in the classroom. The following are the activities we did in class and some notes about what each activity entails:

Tea Party Activity
Quotes were taken from the book that we were reading and each person was given a different quote. We were instructed to read the quote and think to ourselves what the story might be about based on that quote. Then, we had a "tea party" where we each read our quotes to one another and after listening to as many quotes as possible, we were then instructed to develop an opinion of what the story would be about based off of the quotes.

Energizer - Alphabet
We were put into teams, first team to "spell out" the alphabet using all of the bodies in the group won.

Clock Buddies
This is a great strategies for creating pairs and groups of students. Students create a clock and mingle around the room finding a "clock buddy" for each hour on the clock. If you want students to have discussions, they can partner up with their "5 o'clock clock buddy". This breaks up the hassle of trying to find a partner or having someone left out without a partner.

Carousel Reading
Around the room were posters with topics that we might encounter as we are reading the book. We wrote on the chart paper everything we knew about that topic and did this in groups. We then presented it to the class to share what the whole class's knowledge of the subject was.

Plagiarism Free Summaries 
This was my favorite activity from the class that really showed a good way to show students a strategy to avoid plagiarism. We took various short stories or articles and picked out about five to eight, 1-3 word phrases to pick out important parts of the article. Then we compared these words with people in our group. It was interesting to see what main ideas others picked out from the articles. By doing this it ensured that we would copy the words on the page and it was successful for writing summaries in our own words.