We got them up for a VTS and showed the Norman Rockwell painting of a boy sitting at a barrel with his dog next to him while he wrote a letter. Two boys made a comment about how he was not a knight and one said he was writing a letter to a knight. Interesting how just the mention of Knights remained a focus for some as if the image was tied to or had some hidden meaning about knights. The boys know by now that they are free to notice and comment on anything they want while doing VTS, and I believe that for some it is like a challenge or a type of game where they try to guess or figure out what we want or expect them to find, notice or infer.
Derrick did a great job doing the VTS and the boys were all eager as always to participate. This time we decided we would ask the boys to say their name first before they were called on so that those of us, mainly me, can start to connect the names with the faces and for the purpose of re-viewing the video later.
During the VTS boy W. spoke up and made some good observations. In my memory this was progress for boy W. since he is usually more quiet.
After the VTS the boys were reminded about our fun trip to the corn maze and told how special it was that the Shryocks opened the maze just for us to come and enjoy. The boys were then shown how to make a maze like card that had a secret pocket inside. After a demonstration of how to fold and cut the card the boys began to drall some of their favorite parts of the day and then add a thank you note to it.
It took a while to get some of the boys to think of what they wanted to draw and then what they wanted to say but by the end most had gone beyond my expectations and those having trouble starting did eventually get some good stuff down.
Great reflections, Maria! And the pictures are wonderful, too. I have the cards. We should get pics of all of them before we send them. I agree that the boys did a wonderful job! What an experiene!!! They will remember this for some time to come!
ReplyDeleteI observed that the older ones didn't have the same struggle as the younger boys separating the Rockwell image from the Samurai theme. The younger ones seemed fixated. To the K-3s, Rockwell's boy writer was a samurai. This is a perfect example of why it is important to say, "What do you SEE that makes you say that?," forcing the responder to look closely at the image again and back up the supposition with evidence. When they are asked, "Why do you say that," they don't question their own thinking because of their developmentally appropriate egocentrism. "Samurai on the brain" is certainly proof that we engaged them; it does present a task for us to transition them explicitly into our new theme.
Today, November 10, we met with the K-3 boys again. One or two did speculate that St. Maurice was a samurai, but for most, the samurai "hangover" seems to be passing; they were okay with just comparing the knight figure to a samurai. Several remembered Mr. Tilley explaining that the samurai's short sword was called a "katana" and one or two reasoned that since St. Maurice had only one sword in the picture, he couldn't be a samurai; a samurai would have two. There was some disagreement of whether the weapon was a sword or a gun; what appeared to some to be a circular opening at the bottom near St. Maurices foot was their visual evidence that it might be a gun. Jett asked me afterwards if gunpowder had been invented in the middle ages. I told him I had read that it had and that if you look at medieval armor, it changed over time because guns (maybe even crossbows?) meant they needed more protection. That might be a fun exercise....have them arrange pictures of medieval armor chronologically after learning that as weapons evolved, the armour had to get tougher. Through writing, they could explain their thinking and share it with the class....Maybe we could set up a mock police investigation of some sort!