Band Aids...

My favorite poem would have to be Shel Silverstein's poem called "Band-Aids." This poem is great. I love it because it is a funny poem that relates to children. I remember when I was little I would play doctor with my dolls. I would use all kinds of band-aids to help "fix" the doll. I remember my little dolls being completely covered in band aids all over. I think that I related to this poem and that's why I liked it so much.

I could use this poem in my classroom when I'm teaching poetry to show rhyme and to discuss what makes a poem. It would be a great poem to use to keep the students interested and also it would just be a silly poem to read.

Overall, this was one of my favorite poems growing up. It would be a great poem to incorporate into my future classroom and I can't wait to do so!

Magic Talk...

Participating in the magic talk activity in class was really helpful to me. However, it was also quite difficult for me. I love to talk and not being able to talk was really hard. The activity was interesting to participate in because it showed me that it can be done. It was a great learning experience for me.

Magic talk is a great discussion tool for all ages. Students can use drawings, words, or phrases to keep the discussion going. I like magic talk because it is a different way to lead a discussion and complete an activity.

Overall, I enjoyed the magic talk activity in class on Monday. I thought it was helpful to me as a future teacher and I hope to be able to utilize it in my future classroom.

Helpful, or not helpful...that is the question.

We recently had peer conferencing for our books that we are writing in class. I thought that these peer conferences were extremely helpful because the peers that I conferenced with helped me with comma errors and any other grammatical errors they saw. I'm horrible with grammar so having someone to help me look out for these errors was very helpful to me.

While this was very helpful to me, it is not a common practice for me to allow other people to view my writing and correct it. I've learned by doing the peer conferencing in class, that I probably should allow people to look over my writing beforehand.

There are some pros and cons to using peer conferencing in the classroom. Some of the pros are that it is very helpful to have a new set of eyes read your work. It's also helpful to have someone look over your paper to check for grammatical and spelling errors. Doing peer conferencing can help you get a better grade and it can also make you see things that you might not have seen on your own. A couple of cons of peer conferencing in the classroom would be that some students don't like to share their work with others and peer conferencing forces them to. Another con would be that peer conferencing is a time for polite and helpful criticism and some people don't take criticism well.

All in all, I think that peer conferencing is a great way to help students with their writing. It's really helped me through the process of writing this book for class.