Assignment 7

I realize the importance and necessity of doing short writings.  The power writings that Jeff Anderson spoke about would an effective way to help get kids' minds open to exploring impressions about things.  I think the most natural progression after that would be to do some whole class modeling and brainstorming of art work to prepare them for individual writing. I need to start collecting posters so that I can place them around the room.  The benefit of this would be the students are separated and so their thoughts on that picture are not influenced from the others.  The other thing that I was thinking about to reinforce nouns, verbs, and adjectives (which is a CCSS) is to have students in each group numbered a one, two., or three.  The respective numbers think of the above parts of speech that might identify and describe the picture.  Then the students or we could do this whole class could take the words and place them in the best arrangements.  I think the students would enjoy working on sticky notes (the way we did in the workshop) and would make it easier to move things around a bit.   Some of the responses to this lesson were I think good beginnings. And as I stated in the previous entry, I have no idea if (regardless of my students' inexperiences) if their writing was could be expected from second graders.  Personally, I'm impressed and it is a good first start.  Remembering that I ended up taking each of the pictures and we did some brainstorming together and they picked the words that were the most meaningful to them.  Here are three examples, one from each of the pictures they looked at.  Desert: hot, very, very, very hot, gets sand in your shoes, die of thirst, snakes, fun to slide down, fun to ride motorcycles on, would be fun to ride a camel, very hard to walk   Tropical Forest: green, lots of plants, makes oxygen, pretty, beautiful, snakes, monkeys, cool water, mosquitoes, fishing. lots of rain     Flowering Hillside: pretty, beautiful, I want to go there!, camping, hunting spot, pick for my mom, can see for a long way, fun to ride down on my bike,  fun to roll down, fun, windy.