Cluster Fair

At my elementary school we have something called clusters. Every Thursday students switch classes for one hour and are able to go to another classroom that has a specific concept. Some of the different concepts are top chef, tiger tales, bird watchers, scrapbooking, etc. At the beginning of each semester students pick their top three choices and are placed in a certain group. My teacher, Mrs. Brown, has tiger tales which discuses different cultures and learning how to accept everyone.

Last Thursday night we had a cluster fair. This is when the students as well as parents come up to the school (6:00 pm) and the students can show their parents what they did in their cluster. They can also go around the school and see what the other clusters were doing. Each cluster had a table which we decorated the day of the cluster fair. Our table had pottery, t-shirt, and paintings that my students had done throughout the semester. I think clusters are a really great idea and the students seemed to really enjoy it. I hope that other schools will catch on with this idea and have clusters in more elementary schools.

Units of Study

Chapter 12 it talks about have unites of study. Since I am only in my field experience classroom two days a week I don’t get to see much of the beginning of their writings. By the time I get there on Thursday they are usually finishing up with fixing their errors and making a final draft. Nevertheless from what I have seen there is certain times where students are allowed to free write, and then there are times that they are given a prompt. Chapter 12 talks about the importance of both of those.  Its important to let students pick topics because they are learning how be a good writer and by giving them some freedoms they could enjoy writing more.  I know by observing my kids they seem to move a lot faster when they are able to write about something that interests them.

                One thing that this chapter talks about that I have never seen before was the idea of taking a hour slot every other week where they practice writing to a prompt as they would if it was a test. Hopefully I can see this during my full week of teaching. I’m sure some of my teachers have done this I just have not been in the classroom at the time. I also really liked that the idea of letting students spend some of their writing time reading and sharing about a genre/author so that they can gain a better understanding of that author/genre so that when they write they can really understand the topic.  Lastly, I really liked the 2^nd to last sentence in the chapter there it says that, “Any lesson we teach, any conference that we have, has both a history and a future in the life of the workshop.”