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Narrative Writing, Co-Teaching, and Some More Technology!

     For the section on Narrative writing there were so many interesting ideas and activities that could be used in our classrooms that I barely knew where to begin in creating this weeks lesson plan and writing this blog post!

     I absolutely love the idea that using the narrative form in class can help our students to better understand literary devices and how authors create literature. This has me thinking... how can I use this? I would love to come up with a lesson that allows students to come up with their own narrative version of a poem or a non-fiction piece. Allowing them to take into consideration where the literature was written from. Think about the setting, the narrator, and the plot of the story. They would be able to really make it their own but still use similar ideas from the original author of the chosen non-narrative piece. 

     In the Emdin chapter I found that I was struggling to understand the way a teacher gives over all their lessons to a student and just expects them to be able to teach them to the class. So if you guys are feeling like me... here is a video that helped me understand a little better...




This is a good representation of how Emdin is imagining his co-teaching to go. Even though these students are obviously in the elementary levels of school, it can still be easily modified to work for our middle and high school classrooms. 

     Lastly, finishing off with my piece with of the jigsaw this weeks with our friend Troy Hicks and co-author Kristen Hawley Turner. If anyone knows about social media it is surely our generation, right? Yet again the idea of fake news and the Facebook hoax surface. Clearly this issue is popular and needs to be addressed in schools.

     This whole chapter reflected more of the things that we heard at the conference. Be careful of the fake news, be MINDFUL of what you are reading, and think about the arguments that you are making in ALL of your writing, even if it is just on social media. All of which are largely important. I personally love the idea of being able to tweet about something in class, give it your own hashtag, and see what others have to say. This is something that I hope to add into my future lessons, like Taylor and Cheryl did in our first week of co-teaching. 

     Just because I was curious I looked to see what was available for these kinds of lessons and it seemed that PBS offered multiple lesson plans that were relevant to Hicks and Turners arguments. Just something to look at !

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