Chapter 8 BLOG

This chapter is all about teaching kids to use their imagination and developing their language skills through artistic means. This includes: stories, poems, music, role playing, and drama. While I am all about being silly with my kids (and they love it when I burst into random songs or jingles), I struggle with bringing drama into my classroom. What if my students, like me, do not like the attention of putting on a play or speaking in front of others. To make up for where I am lacking, I use poetry and creative writing. When we are doing an interactive writing activity, they struggle with developing details of their stories. They love for me to act out the story and ask them questions as we go along. At school last week, we had an amazing assembly on the writing process. It included developing details, deciding on a genre, and editing through dramatic role playing. I would like to be able to incorporate drama into my classroom. Diaz-Rico states, “Drama is a language laboratory for oral communication skills, enabling students to acquire speaker-listener experiences and increase their ability to decode and encode ideas. Drama makes it possible for both teacher s and students to escape from familiar patterns of language interaction…” (p. 214). It seems like students and teachers could benefit from some time thinking and interacting outside the box.
On a side note, Reading Rockets has created an idea developed around family involvement, fiction, non-fiction, hands-on activities, and imagination. They are called Family Literacy Bags. The bags are themed include: 2 books, instructions, and several activities. The parents are supposed to read with the child and participate in the hands-on or imagination building activity with their child. Is there a better way to develop literacy? I think it would be a great tool in the classroom to use as activity centers. It can be found at: http://www.readingrockets.org/content/pdfs/literacybags/time_08.pdf.


Response to Peers:
Amanda Wright states that imagination is an important tool in the classroom and should be used by teachers. She says, “The reason is if you read a story to a class of thirty-six students, you are going to have thirty- six different pictures to that story because they all visualized different things.” This is true! My students all see things differently. When we write stories together, they come up with a variety of ideas that are based in their imagination. I think we should find more ways to access the imagination of our students in the classroom. Michelle Greco also supports the use of imagination based activities in the classroom. She says, “This is a great way for students to be excited to write, use their imagination, and then be able to organize their stories in a way where they can be performed.” I am a proponent of anything that I can do to get my students excited about writing and reading. Michelle also talks about a program called Academic Enrichment. It is centered around drama, story writing, and performing. I hope I can find more information about it.