Fun: Coming to a classroom near you

This was my bed, until I took two cardboard boxes from my learning center, a hanger, a picture, some paper, a little time and effort. It is now my pirate ship, sans the water, and it's free to sail the open seas.

Ok, so it's not really the most sea worthy vessel, but it can hold its own. I am the kind of person who likes to create. When I get an idea, I run with it and see how far it takes me. I decided to turn my bed into a pirate ship, and, although it would never make it in the ocean, my bed is a pirate ship. So, what does this have to do with teaching? And who let me out of the Psych ward?

As a teacher, it's important that everything you do in the classroom has a lesson to it, whether the children know it or not. If I sat down and told all of my children the history of piracy, no one would pay any attention. That's why tests are such a bad idea- all students do is memorize instead of learn, but that besides the point.

If I get my children up moving around and building a pirate ship, and then talk about pirates, they're going to gain so much more than if I just put it on the History Channel. This has been proven time and time again, with many different situations. At work, a child will be playing with something, like a toy dinosaur, and I teach them things they didn't know, like what a carnivore is. Learning can happen at any time with any actvity. It doesn't all have to be book work.

I think I would just much rather not even have desks in my room, and no T.V. Just a lot of random materials and willing students. Fun and learning can go hand in hand if you're a good teacher, and learning doesn't have to be boring. The most memorable learning experiences I have had all occurred when I was doing something fun. I want to make sure that the fun and random experiences are also learning experiences, because every opportunity counts.

Once upon a time . . .

In this picture, I'm drawing the cover page for our group's Cinderella project.

The story of Cinderella has to be one of my favorites, so when I walked into my College intro to education class and we were telling the story of Cinderella, I was very excited. In my particular group, we were given big paper with words, and we had to draw the pictures that go with the story. As a group, we decided that Cinderella should have blond hair and a big blue dress. We came up with the basic ideas we wanted each page to look like together, and then we split and drew each page as individuals, but everything had to come back together to make a complete story.

This activity made absolutely no sense at first. The class was divided into multiple groups, and each group had a different assignment, but they all involved Cinderella. It wasn't until we all came back together as a group that we saw the purpose. Each group had something different to do, and the level of involvement decreased with each group. The first group had individual projects, coloring pages and what not, and as you went down the line, there was less and less structure, until the last group that had nothing to work with and did a puppet show. It was fun to see what every group came up with. Once we had all finished our presentations, we talked about the purpose behind the assignment, and discovered that it was all for learning.

When teachers hand out cookie cutter worksheets and expect the students to do the same work, the students don't get the opportunity to explore and create what they want to. They're forced to do the same thing as everyone else and there's no self expression involved. In our group, our paper had words, but we were free to make the choices about what Cinderella wore, what her hair looked like, what her dress looked like, and everything else that went into the drawings. We also found out more about each other when we were more involved with each other. Bringing students together as a group gives them an opportunity to meet new people and talk to each other, which they may not do on a daily basis.

As a teacher, it's important to set up environments that children feel comfortable in, so they can be themselves and make friends. Teachers need to leave room open for self-expression, and not hand out the expect the same thing from every student, because every student is different. Some are better speakers, other drawers, listeners, and some are more active than others. A teacher has to decide how to address all the needs in the classroom while keeping the learning moving and going. Learning should be a fun and never ending experience that the children will carry with them, because learning is an essential part of everyday life.