Designing my lesson was more fun than I anticipated. I was inspired by an activity I had done in one of my college creative writing classes, which was to write our own fairy tale. This assignment was great practice in creative writing by combining our own unique videos with a fun genre. As I wrote out the directions and additional material, such as the graphic organizer, I found myself thinking about what would be the most useful for students who are getting ready to write a creative essay.
While I recorded my video, I felt a little self-conscious as I addressed an imaginary class, but I feel good about how the directions turned out. Although I'm not teaching anyone, I added as many important details as I felt were necessary. For example, I included a list of fairy-tale tropes and a brief overview of the plot structure. The only challenging part was recording the teaching demo because I kept getting self-conscious that I wasn't explaining myself correctly or adequately. As a future teacher, I wonder if teaching demos are things that I'll have to do for my own class. I would prefer not to do them, lol.
I imagine that doing this assignment with real students would be super fun! I predict that some students wouldn't feel too crazy about this assignment, but as the process continued, I'm sure students would find real enjoyment from it. I also like the idea of doing this assignment in the future because maybe I can adapt it in other ways. It would be interesting to consider adapting the fairy tale in other media forms, like a stop motion, short video, or art.
Two course readings that I kept in mind were chapter 2 of Troy Hicks' "Creating Confident Writers" and the "Teaching Poetry" article. Hicks's text has valuable insights on organizers like project proposals and pathway planners, which are similar to graphic organizers: "Giving students enough structure to set their goals---without being overly prescriptive" is the key to good teaching and at the core of creating confident writers" (2). I kept this in mind for my imaginary class. Providing writers with a graphic organizer of their story helps categorize different elements they want to include in it.
The "Teaching Poetry" article written by Naomi Nye also inspired me while I was writing my opening script. Nye states, "In order to generate individual thought, one must first generate an atmosphere in which thought is likely to occur. The teacher might have asked questions about potent sunsets in people's memories. Where were you standing? Were you with someone or by yourself?" For an assignment like this, I believe it would be crucial to ask students thought-provoking questions about their experience reading fairy tales.
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