Week in the Field and Multigenre Writing

I had very mixed emotions about spending an entire week in my field placement. I was excited to be there everyday and truly know what was going on with my children as opposed to coming in at the end of the week like we normally do. However, I was really nervous about implementing my own lesson with the class. My lessons were about producers and consumers. On the first day I split the class into three "stores" and explained that they would be acting as producers and consumers for the whole week. The students were really excited for such a fun and different activity and this made me feel really good about what I was doing. The stores then created names for themselves and decided what they wanted to produce. Through out the week they made their products and then on the last day they bought and sold what they had made between each other.

I had planned to do a writing activity with the class on the 3rd day of my unit. On all of the days for our opening activity I either read a book or we watched a movie that was focused on producers and consumers. On the 3rd day I had planned to read the book A Chair For My Mother and talk about making difficult choices. I was going to talk about how the little girl in the book saves all her money and chooses to buy her mother a comfy chair since everything they owned burned up in a fire. I was then going to have the students write about a difficult choice that they have had to make in their lives. Choice has a lot to do with producers and consumers. You have to choose what you want to sell, who you want to sell it to, what you want to make it out of, what you need to buy etc. Unfortunately... We didn't have time to do this activity which was really disapointing for me. Instead of having a day 3 I ended up having to do a day 2 part 2 because the students needed more time to make their products.

If I had my own class I would have been able to stretch the lesson more so that I would be able to fit in everything that I wanted to do. However, I was only given 40 minutes for 4 days to do everything that I had planned (which was too much) so something had to be taken out.

In the article I really liked how much the teacher cared about the students really being committed to the topic of their choice. I know that I can relate to having a terrible topic for a research project and having to stick with it for a long time even though you have no interest in it anymore. I think that the efforts put into selecting a topic would be very valuable and worthwhile because students will be so much more interested and committed to what they are learning about if they really care about it. I also really liked the idea of having to defend your choice. This will also make the students be passionate about their selection.

I found the idea of multi genre writing to be very interesting. It seemed like a new approach to your typical research paper and is something that I would definitely be interested in doing for my future class.