Tuesday, March 16

Tuesday 3/16: Last visit from university supervisor today & things went well. I've grown to look forward to hearing from Mr. Coe. His advice is typically relevant to my current concerns and his demeanor is oh so relaxing. I also utilized this day in the classroom as somewhat of a work day, but first I introduced to students the final Memory Boy project today. With this project I decided to construct a lesson which would require the students to culminate all of the lessons and reactions they gained during their reading of the book and apply it toward a variety of projects. This project idea would require students to both utilize prior knowledge but also construct new lessons as they worked to express their knowledge in a visual project.

Knowing that the interests, strengths, and weaknesses of my students vary tremendously, I decided to have the students choose their own academic path with this project. I provided for the students twenty five different project options which they could choose to complete. I assigned specific point values to each project; based upon the length of the project, the effort required to complete the project entirely according to its directions, and the level of creativity which the project required. This allowed the students the freedom to choose the type of project they’d most like to complete. The project options varied from traditional essays, research papers, art projects, homemade movies, oral history interviews, children’s books, comic books, wildlife related assignments, and science centered projects. While designing the project, I kept specific students in mind and did my best to gear a project toward the individual interests I’d seen my students exhibit.

Having assigned varying point values to each project, I explained to my students that I expected them to complete forty points’ worth of assignments. Some of the suggested projects were worth forty points alone, others were worth as little as ten. Some of the proposed projects included independent work, while others required that students work in groups. This allowed students the freedom to, again, create their own grades and decide their own fates.