Art and Content-Area Literacies

Every middle school student has taken a selfie before and everyone can agree that good lighting is everything when wanting to take a good selfie. Cameras are a complicated piece of equipment to understand but is very educational when dissected. One of the main elements that a camera focuses on is light.  Light and light spectrums are topics taught in 8th grade science classes. The piece of art that I have chosen to discuss is a picture taken by Ted Kincaid. He took this picture by taking the light meter of his Polaroid camera off. I am sure that everyone can imagine what would happen if the light meter was disabled while taking a picture, the camera would not focus on what you wanted it to. I think that this could be used in a science class to help show the importance of the light meter to the camera. I would show this picture and do an activity to further the idea of light and cameras. I think it would be interesting if students could play around with cameras themselves, disabling and enabling the light meter on them. This would allow students to see for themselves how important light is to an everyday camera. Afterward, a discussion about the science behind reflecting and refracting the components of light in a camera would be engaging.

Kaylie Herbert 

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Book Club Response

Overall, I think that book clubs are a great way to make reading fun. Although I think they can get a little tricky to navigate, I think book clubs would be a great thing to incorporate into my math or science classroom. It may be difficult to find an entire book to read in a math or science class, but I think even having mini book clubs for excerpts or short readings would be beneficial. I would love to read an entire math or science book in my classroom, however, I don't know if there are any that are engaging and informational. The book I am reading now, The City of Ember, has many science related topics but I don't think it would be a good move to read the entire book; the book discusses topics but does not explain or go in depth about these topics. The sticky notes strategy is one of my favorites and definitely something I will use. I think that the most beneficial way to navigate book clubs and use sticky notes is to assign each student a specific reading strategy to focus on during their reading time. Giving students free reign to write what they want to on their sticky note may draw attention away from the reading strategies.

One thing I enjoy from our LLED book clubs are the handshakes. While we may not think they are all that fascinating, I can only imagine how excited students would be about it!

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Kaylie Herbert

Strategy Lesson Reflection

I think that our strategy lesson, front loading with images, went fairly well. I think that Maegan and I worked well as a partnership. We both contributed equally to the power point, notes sheet, and lesson plan. We both spoke equally and contributed to the group discussion and overall presentation. Another thing that went well was engaging the class in group discussion. We used the turn and talk strategy deliberately so that the students could participate in a low stakes partner discussion before we brought the whole class into the discussion. We also planned who was going to talk about which slides, how long the students got to discuss, how long students had to read the article, planned questions to ask about each slide. Mostly everything that happened, we had planned for.

Although many things went well, there is one main thing I would do differently. During our group discussion, Caroline brought up the idea of starting with an abstract picture and then move to more concrete pictures. I think that this was a wonderful idea and one that I would implement if I had to teach this lesson again. Many of the picture we showed were very similar (mountainside, ski slope, slide, staircase), but in the future I would add maybe a picture of slope on an actual graph. I think that showing only pictures of slope in the real world creates a disconnect between material and application. If I only ever show them slope in the real world, students may not realize what slope looks like on a mathematical graph.

An unexpected challenge I faced was presenting to people my age. Presenting to my peers is very nerve racking for me and I was very anxious going into this presentation. However, I think that the success of this strategy lesson helped me come out of my comfort zone.

Overall, it was fun, and I REALLY enjoy this particular strategy J

Kaylie Herbert

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