Reflection on In-Class Assignments

There were so many classroom assignments that I thought were really useful.

The Wandering Willy one was really good at getting us to problem-solve and retain information that we might not have known how to use at the beginning. I also think that it was useful in providing us with a way to use a software that most of us were familiar with in a new and interesting way. I never knew that you could do those types of things with PowerPoint, and when I got home, I sat down and played with it forever to try and figure it out. So, it was motivating in class and out of class. It was also really cool to see how you could use the same idea to create an ABC book for the entire class. I thought that it was really fun to see the ABC book, and I really enjoyed thinking about how to use it in my own classroom. I also liked how she used KidPix again after it to make sure that we all got the right answers. It was a really creative way to do it, and I had a lot of fun making the picture and trying to find ways to incorporate all of the other stuff with it.

The postcards were also really neat. I know that we didn't get to do them, but all I was thinking about was how students could really do this. I thought it would be fun to have them each do a postcard for your classroom, and design it. Then it could be a contest to see whose postcard you would use and use the postcard that was the winner to send to each of the families at the end of a unit. Or you could have them design the postcards about a unit.

The position words book was also really fun and entertaining. I thought that Rosie's Walk was such a great way to introduce this lesson, and it's a story that most of the students probably haven't heard before. I also thought that doing the pictures and having the students responsible for that was so neat. They would love to get to take pictures of each other, and it would be fun to see what they came up with and how they used it. Also, I think that this could be a really effective assessment piece to a unit that had something to do with position words, like Dr. Seuss.

Doing things with It Looked Like Spilt Milk was also fun. Right after we did that in class, I was at a preschool room, and they had done it with white paint and blue construction paper, and all I could think was, we saved paper and paint and did the same thing! Also, I think that using the computers was a lot more motivating to do this.

Overall, I thought that the assignments that we did in class were useful to what we were learning about, they were motivating, and we all enjoyed doing them. I also thought that they did a great job of motivating us to try and find new ways to do this in our own classrooms.