The Many Faces of Creativity
Creative Design
Creative Storytelling
This showcase presents some of the work that I have completed during my Masters in Education (MAED) at Michigan State University. Throughout my courses, I have always tried to challenge myself with projects that would enhance my learning and creativity. In this section, you will find a sample of my work that show some of the skills and strategies that I have learned. As I look back at the various projects, I can see how important creativity, focus on student needs and technology have been throughout my work. These are the elements that I would like to continue to focus on as an educator.
Showcase
In this video, I take my viewers through a mincraft world that I have designed for a social studies unit about Ancient Egypt. I chose to build the Ancient Egyptian Pyramids to assess a unit about Howard Carter’s (a famous Egyptologist and archaeologist) discovery of the tomb. The design of this unit attempts to incorporate many different features of assessments, and engages students in discovery based learning.
For this project, I worked on creating a chapter book called ‘Lexi and The Secret Science Club’ that falls under the children’s fiction genre. It is targeted at 7-9 year old girls. I was particularly interested in writing in this genre because I wanted to present science as a fun and exciting discipline for girls and get them hooked on to it from a young age. As science becomes more important in our society, we are sadly seeing that not too many girls are interested in taking it up as a career. This book (or series of books!) is intended to tackle some interesting concepts in fun ways and explore many sides of science that girls may not be aware of. This project features the first two chapters of this book.
In this work, I draw upon Henriksen and Mishra's work that explain that creative ideas build upon existing works. They describe creative works as ‘knobs’ that can be combined and tweaked to come up with new ideas. To illustrate this idea, I took a song which talks about surviving an abusive relationship and coming out from it stronger and altered and combined it to give it a new spin on the idea of surviving a difficult ordeal. The knobs I saw here were those of struggle and pain.
In this project, I explore the concept of morals in Fairy Tales. One moral that is particularly intriguing is the ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ moral in Little Red Riding Hood. Morals are themselves an abstraction of the whole narrative of the fairy tale. They tell us in the simplest way what the underlying meaning of the story is. This describes the essence of abstracting. It involves simplifying the main concept into its essential part. Here I identify the critical features that can help reveal an important and surprising factor in my chosen Fairy Tale.
Focus on Student Needs
For this project, I decided to focus on a 7-year-old girl who was an English Language Learner (ELL). The student was able to speak and respond in incomplete sentences in English and can tell a simple story. Despite this being her fourth year at this all-English speaking school, she was not yet reading at grade level and is in the lower ability group in literacy. The student’s weakness in spelling as well as the lack of focus on a pattern based spelling approach led me to focus on and implement a word study program that focuses on spelling patterns. The project details my differentiated spelling instruction and my findings.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every elementary teacher has a child in their classroom that has squealed in terror, ‘I do not want to write!’ For this project, I undertook a research project to examine the different criteria that affect student motivation to write. This project helped me understand the environmental, individual, and task factors that are extremely important in encouraging students to write.I also developed a survey that can be administered to my students to understand the various factors that may be affecting their motivation to write.
Technology
In this project I use a Content Management System, Edmodo to create a reading assessment. The assessment is a reading comprehension test that has been differentiated for the three-tiered groups (lower ability, middle ability and higher ability) in my classroom. In my previous review, I had highlighted that one of the great features of Edmodo is that it allows for personalised learning. Teachers can create small groups within the main class and target each group with different assignments and quizzes. Using this small group feature, I was able to create a differentiated assessment for each group that varies the number of questions asked and the format of questions between groups. This project is detailed here.
For this project I designed an online resource library to help teachers and educators instill number sense in their students and maximize their understanding and application of number facts. These various tools help educators incorporate interactive and engaging technology in their teaching to support these essential first years (Kindergarten to Grade 2 ). Two areas of the common core have been specifically chosen under which resources will be provided as they are critical in establishing a strong mathematical foundation for students as they progress throughout the grades.
Photo Credits:
Creative Writing Project: Free Wix Images
Creativity in teaching: Learning to abstract: Personal photo
SUsing an existing framework to develop creative ideas: Free Wix Images
A developmental approach to spelling instruction: Free Wix Images
Motivation to write case Study: Free Wix Images
Edmodo logo retrieved from here
Online Math resource library: Free Wix Images