My MEL experiences

• Student /Teacher relationships:
  Last semester in college I had geology class. My professor fit this category so well. He was firm and made sure we knew what we needed to accomplish, yet everyday was filled with loads of humor and funny remarks injected into his lecture. He said them as they popped into his head and they were just so funny. His humor really helped me focus on the difficult content we were learning and made me want to go to class everyday.

• Hands on: activities:
  One of my favorite high school teachers was my French/ English teacher. She is older and therefore has a very traditional way of teaching: by speaking to us, talking and reading about a certain topic, then filling out worksheets she provides to learn more about the topic. Yet Mrs. Litchfield also had plenty of years of experience behind her and knew that you had to throw in some hands on activities to help the class pass by. One of my most favorite activities she did with us was when we created a Jeopardy board on the back of a pull down map. We wrote down the vocabulary we had been learning, English on one side, French on the other. Then we played! We had to ask for the amount of money in French, we had to say the phrase “what is…and the answer” in French, besides just thinking of the word we needed to say. There were some words I couldn’t think of and I wanted to remember and say them so badly that I wanted to go home right then and study all my vocabulary words and know them by heart. That activity was very successful in getting me motivated, and I plan on using it in my classroom.

• Learning styles:
  My high school was very good about testing each student and making sure they knew what learning style they were. I knew from early on that I was visual. One day in my Biology class my teacher Ms. Herbert asked us all to write down our learning style and place it on a piece of paper so she could see it, like a name tag. Ms. Herbert was a visual learner just like me. She then told all her visual learners to imagine in their minds that we were in a large field with tall grass. If we walked through the grass once and looked behind us we would see that the grass was a little bent, but had popped right back up. But if we kept walking on that same path over and over again and again, each time the grass would lay down more and more, and the path we were making would be more and more visible. Then she told us that this path in the field was the way we learn things. The first time we hear something it doesn’t stay in our minds long. We must go over the new information time and time again, until it was pact down in our brains. I loved this visual analogy, and the lesson has still stuck with my today!

• Helping students succeed:
  In the third grade class I tutor in there is a young girl who moved here late this past fall. She was far behind all the other students in her reading and writing skills. I tried to work hard with her on her spelling words each week. She could hardly get one word spelt correctly. I was so hard because I wanted her to succeed so badly. I never once doubted that Kayla could get her spelling words correct. Even when she constantly mixed up and spelt the words When and went wrong time and time again, I made sure to stay positive and make sure she knew that we could get them down. I was confident that she could get them down if she kept trying. I can’t remember if she got those specific words correct on her test that week, but I do know that since then she has still been trying hard at home and she has started to learn more words. It is hard, but it makes me happy to see that she is not getting discouraged.

• Connections:
  Another example from the third grade classroom was the activities the students do when reflecting on the chapters they just read in their reading. One activity is they try to find connections between the events in the chapter and events from their own life, or other books. This activity really gets them thinking outside the box and helps them relate the story to their personal lives. It helps practice logical thinks and figuring out how to find small bits of information that connects to other places, events, or themselves.