I hate crafts.
And having been taught in a very straight-forward, textbook manner throughout my secondary education, I often forget that my kids like to do artsy craftsy things. Luckily, they remind me by acting up and refusing to work after I give them one too many read-and-answer assignments.
So to appease the kiddies and their need for cutting, pasting and coloring, we made a turkey bulletin for Thanksgiving. Each child wrote a paragraph about how they would feel if they were a turkey around this time of year. After they were done, they colored and cut out a turkey's head and feet. Then they pasted the turkey parts onto their writing assignment sheet, making the text the turkey's body. It was cute and it helped decorate my classroom for the holidays. I also hate making little cutesy things to decorate my room. But I know the kids like it. That's why I sit around on Saturday nights cutting out paper leaves and snowflakes.
The kids kicked and moaned about having to write at first. They always do. But after they settled down, they came up with the cutest responses. Many of the kids said they would run away fast and hide from the hunters. One girl said she would give herself up willingly to the hunters so the people would have food to eat-- but not before running around crazily to give those hunters some exercise. And yet another student wrote that he would gang up with some other animals, including a coyote, and basically start a massacre to annhilate all people. He's a little gruesome. But at least they made me happy by writing. And at least I made them happy by giving them the chance to color, cut and paste.
Teaching, at least in Special Education, seems to be mostly about compromise between me and the students. I need to make a special effort to stray from the manner in which I was taught-- textbooks and worksheets. To make linking verbs a little more fun (and to be a decent teacher, really), I sit around cutting strips of sentences and unbending paper clips so they can actually link together sentence parts. Oftentimes I wonder if I would have learned better if my teachers back in the day had used multi-sensory methods to teach. Perhaps then I wouldn't have to relearn whatever the heck linking verbs are the night before I teach it. (Another point learned from three months in the field-- as a first-year teacher, I'm sometimes just one day ahead of the kids. Too often I'm relearning, refreshing and rehashing middle school math and grammar the night before my lesson is "due.")
Experiential learning has been proven to be the best way to learn and remember things. Experiences where we see, move, smell, touch, and hear are rarely forgotten (such as that trip to Disneyland or the "Row Row Row Your Boat" songs we sang and danced to ad infinitum as kids). Reading is a mass-based learning device that has only been possible for the last 500 years (think Johann Gutenberg and his press) and only used in American public education for less than 200.
American Education is ruled by those who were able to sit still and take tests as kids. Native American kids in the Amazon, on the other hand, do not have to sit in classrooms all day. They learn from their elders while on fishing trips, at ceremonies, and in other ways (although there are more and more traditional sit-down classrooms being built every day).
Being just a day ahead of the kids is normal for first-time teachers. That's why we have textbooks. Like a musician, you will get past the "sight-reading" stage and eventually learn to play the music well. As a veteran teacher, you will become adept at improvising new music on the spot as the day unfolds.
Congratulations on making "turkey day" both educational and meaningful for the kids!
Posted by: Phil Nash | November 30, 2005 at 06:28 AM