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We discussed together as a group how we can strengthen our relationships with our future students through applying our documentation to our teaching practices and activities. We also discussed different ways we can use technology as future educators to keep our documentation organized and keep up-to-date records on each student's learning to tweak activities to be able to keep students engaged.

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made by Hanna, Samantha, Murphy, and Gabrielle

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01/24/2024 Multimedia Concept Map on Documentation (Gabrielle)

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01/24/2024 Multimedia Concept Map on Documentation (Gabrielle)

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We collectively decided how we can implement documentation into our future practice. Through notes, videos, pictures, etc, we can elaborate on students' child development to have a further understanding of their learning processes.

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Today in class we spent time discussing our thoughts from the reading and describing the relationships and roles that teachers are able to play within the classroom environment. Overall, I felt that we were able to come up with ideas that supported the readings, as well as provided examples that we felt were useful within the classroom. Additionally we spent time working with our group members that were in class to begin writing a loose script for our puppet show.

Personally I felt that I understand the idea of relationships that we are attempting to demonstrate through our writing and word maps that we made in class. On our word map, we focused on teacher-teaching, student-teacher, student-student and teacher and student. When creating our examples, it was important to think about the ways that we will be able to demonstrate this as educator. As we worked together, I believe we all shared valuable ideas that work well with the main idea of understanding relationships regarding the role of a teacher. The biggest aspect that I felt I touched on was the general idea of teachers understanding that their students are much more than students. We should view them as humans and treat them in that way, regardless of their age.

Another large focus of class today was taking time to practice sewing. We watched three videos on different ways of sewing and then spent the remainder of class practicing the ways we learned. This was a struggle for me, but as I practiced, it became easier. Taking time to practice on smaller pieces of fabric will (hopefully!) help us become more confident before we take our abilities to our actual puppets.

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01/31/2024 Concept Map on Relationships (Hanna)

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01/31/2024 Concept Map on Relationships (Hanna)

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We were tasked today with coming together to construct a multimodal element reflecting on our takeaways from our personal readings. We also were able to incorporate some aspects we took away from reading through each other's reading responses. This was interesting to think and discuss around, being that it was something that stood out to us orginally. We focused our concept map on the importance of different relationships that can form in the classroom. It was full circle to discuss with each other about concepts that stood out to us from each other's work and then come back to the idea given to the reading about the importance of student-student relationships. It was cool reflecting on the idea that we were an active representation of how positive group work can be within the classroom, as it was helpful to us all today to better understand. We all took away from the readings about the different roles you can, and should, take on as a teacher. The classroom should be as much your students' space as it is your own space, so it is necessary to create a space where everyone can feel represented and heard, regardless of the titles "student" and "teacher", to a reasonable extent.

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Lauren, Hanna, Murphy, Samantha, and Gabrielle

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We began class by discussing this weeks readings. We dove into the question of, How do you understand the "quality" of childhood education. During this discussion we gathered the main points we drew from the Tobin reading. This reading opened our minds to the fact that there is not a standard quality of education. Education looks differently between different cultures and what works best for the children. One teaching approach may be very beneficial and highly valued in one culture but not another. This does not mean that any one cultures quality of education is superior to another, this simply means that different teaching approaches and techniques work for different cultures.

We then got started on working on our puppet project. We began by laying out the scenes and further diving into who each character is. Describing the puppets characteristics and attributes to the show will further help us when drafting our script. We then started working on the puppets themselves. By watching the clips provided in the module, we were able to visually understand how to trace the stencils onto our fabric. Today we were able to trace the stencils and begin sewing the head. Having the video to guide us through the instruction made me feel much more confident in what I was doing! Overall, I think today's class was very eventful with meaningful time and thought spent through discussions, putting ideas together for our script, and starting to sew our puppets.

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02/14/2024 Week 6 Reflection (Gabrielle)

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02/14/2024 Week 6 Reflection (Gabrielle)

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We started class this week after the presentation on Piaget with our group and talked about how the documentary was eye-opening and heartfelt for all of us. We mostly didn't recognize the impact that poverty truly has on education overall beforehand, but now we have a much broader understanding from the documentary and the readings, specifically the Gorski (2016) reading. We talked about how our key takeaway from this reading was that the ideology that we embrace in our teachings in the future determines the way we interpret problems in education and how we solve it. We all agreed that Structural Ideology would be the best for us in education to promote an inclusive environment and resolve the issues of equity in the classroom. We then all discussed a brief overview of what readings we did and what they made mention of. We came to the conclusion that all of these readings had the same theme: Inclusivity. Hanna talked about how she read Tsuei (2016) and how the reading talked about advocating for more inclusive practices needed in the classroom setting. Murphy and Gabrielle talked about how they read Watson (2016) and how it overall mentioned the importance of knowing when to tolerate it or intervene during instances of different behaviors from what's normalized are happening with a child/student with a diagnosis. Samantha mentioned how she read the Olander (2016) reading and that it included the aspects of both inclusion and exclusion in the educational environment. Lauren talked about how she read the Yoon (2016) reading and that the reading included aspects of inclusion in early childhood by showing the impact of inclusion in the classroom through Lucas's personal story. After the group discussion, we began our Platform Paper 1 workshop and used the guiding questions to help us build the start of our papers. Since most of us in the group write our papers and generate ideas better in a different environment, we decided to only devote about 20 minutes to this. Then, we switched over to writing the script together for our puppet show and added on an entire new song parody for our show that will allow for the children to understand each puppet's feelings, except for the one puppet's feelings, Jessica, because she is not included yet in that scene. After working on our script for a good amount of time, we continued working on creating our puppets through sewing the head and body, while still collaborating and discussing many ideas for our puppet show.

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Today in class we did not spend much time discussing our reading responses or readings from the week. This week, We were tasked with exploring more into the topic of what an anti-bias and anti-racist education should look like. Instead of digging into deep conversations this week regarding that, we spent the beginning and majority of class time making real progress on sewing our puppets. As a group, we had a couple of setbacks while working on our puppets today. A few times our thread accidentally ripped while we were in the middle of sewing a part of the puppet together. At first, we thought the only way to keep going was to start over, so that is what we did. It was hard ripping out all the work we had done up until that point and having to redo it felt redundant. It was not until one of us noticed that we did not have enough strength to finish the part we were sewing, that we thought of another way to solve instead of starting over. We were able to come up with the idea and attempt to end what we had already done where the thread ran out and or broke and then make a new starting point next to it and continue from there as if it had never ended in the first place. We learned that this was a much better solution to the problems we kept being faced with as beginner/first-time sewers.

Personally, I found today to be a real failing and learning experience. There were a lot of setbacks in my journey of sewing today. I was making mistake after mistake; making the spacing between my stitches too big, running out of thread without finishing all my stitches, and having my thread rip unexpectedly without finishing. Although there were a lot of things seemingly going wrong, as a group we were able to come up with what we thought were the best ways at the time to fix them and throughout the class were able to reach a final point of a much simpler solution to help us not waste our work and continue past the troubles. I definitely learned a lot from this major sewing class and was able to recognize myself moving faster and more efficiently through pieces I started working on towards the end of our class.

At the end of class, we took some time to respond to our peers reading responses. I think each week we continue to get better with our reflections on the readings. We did not elude time to talk about the readings as a group, but from reading everyone's responses, and replying to two of them, I was able to get a good idea of where we all stood on the idea of anti-bias and anti-racist education. We seem to all pick out and be caught by the same ideas from each reading. I would have liked to have a stimulated conversation to dive more into what we all thought about ways to fulfill these concepts in our future, but we always have next Wednesday.

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We started off the class listening to 2 presentations which were on B.F. Skinner and Maria Montessori. In the Behaviorism presentation, we learned how Behaviorism has played a role in early childhood education with reinforcement in the classroom. We also learned how extrinsic motivation impacts how people learn and make decisions. The Maria Montessori presentation taught us that the Montessori approach is child-centered but very structured. We also learned that the children choose their own activities because the learning is individualized, while the teacher acts as a guide and observer in education. We thought it was also interesting how this approach has a focus on parent involvement being encouraged since our parents have played a role in our education. After the presentations, we watched a video about children's 100 languages, which we felt relates to what we are learning about different approaches in education. These different approaches touch on different aspects of these "languages" as some approaches dive more into the arts while others touch more on the aspect of play-centered learning which uses creativity and imagination. Then as a group, we participated in the class discussion of the approach we chose, Montessori, which we explained relates to the constructivist philosophy of education. We then watched a video on the Montessori approach being applied inside a classroom, where we got to hear and see the children's perspectives on the classroom approach (ex: "Mistakes help you learn"). We then watched a video on the Waldorf approach to education, which outlined the imagination of a child through play-based learning. We found it fascinating how the video talked about movement being the first language of children for learning and that the experiences learned in this environment will play out later in life.

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Hanna - red

Murphy - yellow

Lauren - green

Gabrielle - blue

Samantha - purple

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3/20/2024 Puppet Making! Personal Reflection (Murphy)

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3/20/2024 Puppet Making! Personal Reflection (Murphy)

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Today in class we spent the first few minutes of class working with our groups to determine how far along each group member was on their puppets. We were all in similar places which made it easy for us to determine a plan moving forward. We have decided that we were going to take class today to work on our puppets and make as much progress as possible. What we did not finish, we would finish on our own time to ensure we had enough time moving forward. Next class we will work together to create a script for our puppet show. After we finished our plan, we submitted it and began working on our puppets. We finished the head and the arms of the puppet. The next steps for us will be to connect the arms, add eyes, buy clothing, and begin creating the hair. After these steps are completed, our puppets will be finished. This allows us to use our time in class to prepare a script and focus on practicing that before we will be recording it. Although there were some challenges in making our puppets this week, we were all able to persevere and work together to create our puppets successfully.

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Today in class, we started the class with presentations about Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey. These presentations throughout the semester have allowed myself, as for everyone else, to see how these theories reflect into our teaching styles. It is interesting to see how Vygotsky has had such an impact on the world of education from his studies. After the presentations, we took time to reflect on our discussion boards and leave notes on our group members' writings. For myself, the week 12 reflection I feel will be reflected heavily into my final paper for this course. It allowed me to connect the readings to my own observations, while still reflecting on my future as an educator. After taking time to reflect on our reading responses, Hanna and I continued to work on our puppets. During this time, her and I sewed the arms onto our puppets after stuffing and finishing the sewing of the arms. After connecting the arms, we continued to accessorize our puppets, by adding hair, eyes, and discussing what clothing we will be using for our puppets. During our time of completing our puppets, we lightly discussed what our script will look like for our show. As a whole group, we are taking the time to ensure we are growing comfortable with creating the script for our puppets. Going forward, we are to complete an introduction of our puppet, giving background and character descriptions before class next week.

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This week our main focus was finalizing our puppet show script. By utilizing the time given to us, we were able to completely finish the script and make finishing touches. Murphy and I worked together the brainstorm the script scene by scene. While we did this, Gabrielle finished her work she had been doing with the songs.

Murphy and I were able to come up with a rough draft of a script. After creating the rough draft, Murphy put the script into a new format to make it easier for everyone to read. While she accomplished this, i added finishing touches to the script such as who says what and movements each character will do. When Gabrielle was finished developing the songs, we implemented the into the script to where we thought they would fit the best.

After forming the final script the three of us reviewed it and made any tweaks we thought were necessary. With not having our whole group there, we thought it was best not to submit the script until we got input from all group members. We were able to all meet to go over the script and make any changes. This allowed for all of us to get a better understanding of our characters role within the play. By all of us collaborating together, it made the process of writing and developing the script go much smoother.

Once we were done with the script we were able to look at our Multimedia Documentation and make any revisions. We were able to work together to make the changes that we thought would improve the presentation of our multimedia documentation.

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4/10/2024 Video Editing! Personal Reflection (Murphy)

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4/10/2024 Video Editing! Personal Reflection (Murphy)

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This week we met to record our puppet show video. We started preparing to film in a different classroom of the Thomas Building before we had to switch locations because it was time for another class to begin in the room that we were in. We were not sure where we were going to film our video, but luckily Gabrielle had a place in mind that we could go to. As a group, we discussed how we would set up for the video and began practicing. Eventually we were ready to begin recording. Instead of making many smaller clips, we thought it would be easier to break our video into separate sections by taking dramatic pauses so it was easier to determine where we were at in the recording.

After we finished recording the video, Sam sent me the film and I began editing. I used CapCut on my computer and I found it to be extremely easy to use. It allowed me to break the film into separate sections and piece them together. Outside of waiting for the video to download, it was a very simple process. After editing I submitted the video for my group.

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Today was our last class! We performed our puppet show for the class, and I feel we were much more comfortable doing this. Overall, we got closer as a group while creating our puppets throughout this semester, and we were able to add our own personalities into our performance. It was rewarding to be officially complete this assignment after many weeks of prepping. We had so much fun through this class!