Lec 9 MIT CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace

my name is Maria de tree and I teach 5th grade class at the Harbor Kent School in Boston and my students have been working with the staff festival and I'd like to share some of the products with you and how we made the connection between the staff festival story and the children's own story and how it helped us to go into other cultures as well not just learn a little bit about the Japanese culture and we started with them of course the work that was on the cd-rom and the children first viewed each site at random and they just got a little bit of information about each site according to what they were interested in I basically gave them free reign at the beginning so they work in small groups and travel from side to side they traveled on the train they went fishing and they went to the auction the fish auction they travel to a model shop and all the other sites until they were finally ready to focus on particular ones and what I tried to do was to encourage the children not only to learn about a new culture the Japanese culture from the star festival but to also start thinking about what their own background was what the questions were in their own families and that led to and lots and lots of activities we began with the with the professor's family tree and we learned about the maternal grandparents the paternal grandparents and the brothers and sisters aunts and uncles and what each one of them did this gave the children the opportunity to go home and to ask questions of their own families and we basically I did a timeline of themselves and in each one day designed and created this timeline and then shared with the children based on a timeline kind of a timeline and a family tree that the professor had in his story and you can see some of the students were some of them are very detailed but it was for them but some of them was the first time that they had interviewed their parents and from that we continued with their own search and had the children interview their mothers because at one of the sites the professor kind of finds out a little bit more about his mother and what her experiences were especially during the war and here you see the children's stories that were produced from the interviews they were able to take the camera home and from the interview questions then then they summarized all of the answers and wrote a really nice story about their parents as well and we had this displayed in the hallway so when it was parents night the kids were pretty proud of what they had done recently I'm incorporating the kind of the idea that the professor has on the cd-rom where you can click on a notebook and you can find out more information so what I'm doing right now is having the children use the same interview process but download some pictures on their own and create go on the internet and download some maps and even some pictures they have to do with that particular country this happens to be China this child's mother came from China but also to find some web-sites that make a connection to whatever the child is focusing on or has in the story so that everyone is able to visit this child's mother's home and learn from it so it's not just Japan and their own culture but to visit each other's cultures and I'm these are kind of need and the kids really look forward to working on that also as well fact i just finished these today the children had to choose a different culture rather of their brother in deadly rome 2 to research and i haven't seen these yet so I'm hoping they're good you see they worked with a student teacher and they had to do a little bit of history something about the economy a little bit of politics and places to visit and to focus on a festival because the star festival focuses on Tanabata so I wanted them to focus on a festival of that region this one is ramadan in Iraq how feel free is so it looks like this charlie a good job but every child did that so it's something that I wouldn't have done before but it's kind of has given me ideas of what to do in the classroom and tied into what I'm teaching as well one of the sites is the right now we're doing a poetry and it mentions about the arts and the music of Japan so that it inspired me to use Keiko as a focus of the poetry unit and what we did since gift giving is so special and so unique we printed all of our poems in this lovely book so I was teaching them well it's not really a regard me but some paper folding and when you open it you will see all of the children's poetry and it gave them a chance to share their work and it's based on the ancient form of Japanese poetry which is something that I had never tried myself but it was easy to do because they were so knowledgeable now of focusing on nature focusing on on just admiring a flower such as flower arranging or kimono on Mount Fuji so I was really happy with the children did with that let me tell you a little bit about the classroom when we started with the entire class I show the children how to bind the book by hand my friend said this was Japanese binding so the way that books open from left to right caboose we took a travel we took out a trip to Japan and show the children how to fill out passport information because that's a skill that they need to do when they're older filling out forms and what did one actually looked like to get a passport in the United States and of course there's a picture but I use my passport for something else I use it so that they could record all of the books that they read about Japanese culture could be a folk tale it could be a history book it could be a biography any type of book that was connected to Japan and as you can see the children were really encouraged to and they were all so enthusiastic to read all of these books because child read lots of the man I used the star because it was connected to star festival just a little incentive and we did a lot of writing usually we write in journals but I allow them to do this in the do their writing in this book and up I begin with their ideas of Japan and what did they know because I know that they know very little and as we reflected each time we learned about living on an island because Japan is made up of many many islands so they brought up a discussion about what kind of animals what kind of food and that led us into doing a little bit of research about animals sea animals so the children did some illustrations as well and some of them even wrote some poetry about the animals themselves some really nice nice work developed from it and it was nice because it wasn't just okay that's right let's write a story or let's do a research about an animal let's jewelry let's do a poem above fish they really had an interest now because of the couple of sites where they visit the the the can read lips where they visit the the market where they have the the auction yes and then they and what interest them was that they spoke to a fisherman but it wasn't a fisherman it was a woman so they looked quite amused that it was a woman that was speaking to them and telling them about our hard life was doing that kind of work we also had let me just show you a little bit more the professor was this came to visit us so they recorded their reflections on that day and as they learned they wrote a little bit about what their impressions were at the time here you see the study of the family tree which you saw the the family time line before and then we learned map skills a little bit about celebration they didn't know anything about turnabout oh I didn't know anything about town about to either but now I think I know enough to amuse them and entertain them we were able to compare the the weather of Tokyo and some of the other cities at the time they were getting ready for the Olympics in in Nagano so we were able to also tie in some information about the Olympics as well and basically other interesting activities we did weather studies and time and time zone studies which is part of the geography that we have to do and lots and lots of information interesting is the letter writing that they had to do we deliver them a bit of connection between America and Japan and the picture of rides and a little bit about Hiroshima and each one of the boys was one of the gentlemen who lived in Hawaii at the time and he was looking for bright and wrote a letter to a Japanese woman and the results were really really good so these are just a few things that we've accomplished but there are lots and lots of ideas and lots of branching out that any teacher could do and you'll have fun doing it ok