Angela 5150

I would like to start out by saying that this was a hard assignment for me. In Mahiri's article and Autrand's lessons, the content was designed for students who are much older than mine. I will be teaching 3rd grade next year after finishing 2 years of second grade. In general, I think my students are comfortable creating visual projects. However, they are used to creating them for the purpose of bring them home.

As I read Mahiri's article, I realized that my students are just beginning to understand what it means to write for an audience. We spent a lot of time this past school year asking ourselves, "what do I want my reader to understand when they are done reading my work?" I think that we could use modalities beyond reading and writing to explore the idea of communicating to an audience.
My students use computers, but they do not crate projects on them much if at all. I would like to have my students create a project using computers to link visual images, music, and text. However, we will need to do some work to prepare for that culminating activity.

For our first activity, I will guide the students through an exploration of the song "This Land is my Land." I chose this song because it is a song that some kids are familiar with and that we will already have sung it together. It also relates to our social studies curriculum unit about communities. I will post the lyrics and take notes while the kids answer the following questions together:

Why do you think people sing this song?
How do you feel when you sing this song?
Pick a line from the song and tell us what it means to you.
What do you see in your head when we sing. . .?

Then I will have the student break up into groups. I will assign each group a verse or line from the song and their job will be to create a poster that has the words from the song and a picture to help people understand what the song means to us. Once the posters are created, we can make a book to use while singing the song.

Ultimately I would like to put their images into a digital presentation to share with them. This would be a launch into a second activity. For this activity, I would like to the kids to use the computer to illustrate a song. I would like to provide a list of songs that the students are familiar with and that will lend themselves to the assignment. The students will use a program such as kidpix to make illustrations to go along with the song that they choose. I would like the students to include the lyrics as text for this assignment. As a presentation, we will sing the songs while viewing the pictures. We will talk about the experience with the following guiding questions:

How do you feel when you sing this song?
What is something that you saw that made you think while you were singing this song?
Has your thinking changed since you have seen these pictures while singing this song?

Moving on, I would like the students to create a multimedia presentation that does not have to have the lyrics as the text. I also want to have them teach the class about something of their choice using music and a digital presentation. The "digital divide" is a major hurdle to overcome. I am not comfortable with these modalities myself, so that makes it hard to envision what the possibilities are at my students' level of technological ability. As we experiment, this should become less of an issue.