Things are pretty easy going at the moment.  Just a few things due each week, many of which I have already taken care of.  I just ended that sentence with a preposition, but I never really understood why you cannot do that.  I think everyone will get the point of that sentence even though it ends with a preposition. Anyway, things are pretty laid back right now, but I have a feeling that things will be different starting next week.  That time of year is coming up when everything will be due at the same time, and there are some things that are just impossible to get a head start on for one reason or another.  Oh well, I always push through.  It's really no big deal.  Ten's of million's of Chinese people have to carry all of their belongings with them to wait, for weeks at a time sometimes, for the chance to catch a train to travel multiple days with hardly any room to breath so they can see their family for the one and only time of the year for a couple days during the New Year.  Yeah, I think we'll all push through.  Hopefully with a little less complaining this time...

article/ch 12/field reflection

One thought in particular I had when reading about the article about writing multigenre research papers is that they would be a good culminating piece for children to work on in the writing workshop.  Allowing the children to include multiple genres in one piece would be a great way to assess what skills and knowledge they have gained as writers over the past year.  In relation to chapter twelve, I believe that you would first need to do a unit study on how to construct a multigrenre piece as it is a new concept and could be very important in the evolution of the way writers present research. 

During my week in the field, my subject to teach was science.  So, instead of focusing on the whole week, I will focus on the day I did a focus lesson with my students.  My focus lesson was about how writers can use labeling to make their writing more informational.  This was pretty cool sense I just read on page 138 how the genre of label books is a suggested unit of study for K-1.  The focus lesson took about ten minutes in which I explained that when you give good information it can still help even more to have a picture in which to help the reader better see what you are talking about, and one way to make the picture more informational is by labeling.  I then read them an excerpt from a book that had labeled a plant and explained to them what labeling is and gave them examples.  I then gave the children about 25-30 minutes of independent writing time to write about the parts of a plant they knew about, and then draw a picture of a plant and label those parts.  After independent time, they each shared their picture with a partner and I drew 4 names of students to share with the whole class.  I noticed that many of them did well with labeling their plants and many of those truly understood the concept.  I really felt like my lesson was a success the next day when we went outside and drew four different plants to compare differences, and I noticed about 5 students labeling the plants they had drawn, and that was not even something I had suggested.