Art and Content-Area Literacies

The three prints above were part of a multi-volume album that illustrates the uniforms and weapons of the Russian army from the early nineteenth century. The first print by Polka is of two privates of the Chevalier Guard. The second print is of privates and sergeant of the Palace Grenadiers. The third print by V. Adam is of Lancer and flag-bearer of the Chevalier Guard. These prints could be used in a social studies classroom to study the history of the change of the Russian army uniforms and weapons. Specifically, it could be used in a pre-reading exercise as front loading with images. It could be shown along with other Russian army uniforms and weapons to show the changes throughout time. After the students have viewed the images, they could talk with their table mates and compare the images. This could be used as a think/pair/share where the students discuss the differences in the Russian army uniforms and weapons. Then, the students would share out with the rest of the class their ideas from the images. This could also be used as a way for the students to create a timeline for the Russian army. They could have print outs of each image and have to arrange them within their table to find the correct order from oldest to newest.  

219

Book Club Blog

            I personally do not think I would ever do book clubs in my math or social studies classrooms. However, I think they could be used in a way that could supplement certain topics in both classrooms. I enjoyed the book club we did in this class because it really made me think about ways this could be done in my content area classrooms. My group’s book, Hidden Figures made me realize how these books could supplement our lessons. Hidden Figures had a lot of Civil Rights depictions, which made me think about how I could tie books like this one into my social studies classroom. I do not think that reading whole books in a classroom would be really helpful for the children because they could skip over the important details, or the reason behind why you chose the book. Reading sections or chapters of books would be a great supplement to specific topics. This would give the students a chance to see how the things they are learning about play out in fictional and nonfictional worlds. Also, by not reading the entirety of a book they will not miss out on the details that are most important to the topics that are being taught. I would never have my class read an entire book, but I would for sure use sections of a book to supplement my lessons. This also made me think about how my English teachers would supplement the books we would read with clips of movies to give more of a visualization of certain chapters. This is a great way to supplement lessons without reading a whole book or watching a whole movie.

277

Strategy Lesson Reflection - Sketch the Text

I thought overall our strategy lesson on Sketching the Text went pretty well. The flow felt very smooth. I thought modeling our strategy lesson instead of just having notes on how to do it worked really well with this type of strategy. Additionally, I thought having a short and sweet PowerPoint presentation worked well because otherwise our peers may have become bored with a long drawn out presentation. Picking short readings also helped with the issue of boredom. The short readings that effectively showed the strategy lesson gave our peers a clear understanding without boring them. If I could do anything differently, then I would make specific questions for our peers to answer about the pros and cons and likes and dislikes for the strategy. I thought maybe it was hard to get something out of them because we left it open to them to say whatever they wanted. The only unexpected thing we encountered was a sort of long wait time we had after asking about the pros and cons of the strategy. It was a little bit awkward, so in the moment we made up specific questions off the top of our heads. I think if we had specific questions, and then let them turn and talk quickly at their table before coming into a whole class discussion there would have been less of an awkward pause, and they would have been willing to share. Overall, I felt our strategy lesson went really well.

246