What a night

Well tonight I was suppose to have class online with everyone and we were meeting with Dr. Veltze. I got held up in Hickory and I made it as everything ended. Dr. Nita is suppose to post the video link, but I feel horrible for missing the class.

I have been doing a lot of reading for my groups choice on Chapter 7. Modern Fantasy. The book is actually pretty good, and it's been hard to put it down. It's about a girl that is able to go back in time during the Civil War through an old root cellar. I haven't checked on my individual choice yet, hopeuflly it will be at the library.

Our last class was really fun. We all presented our International presentations and had our supper with the different types of food. We presented our book sharings...I actually typed mine up, b/c I figured I would forget ot say something..And of course I did forget to say some stuff. Story of my life... Anyways, back to more reading. Stress, stress, stress.... And this is only the second semester into this!

Ready for class!

Well I'm ready for class tonight. We get to finally do our International Fair. My group is doing ours on Bolivia and ASU's Sister Library Project. I will blog about that later! Sunday night my literature circle met to talk about our last book, called "Light". Noel was the only one that had her book, so we met in a chat room and she read the book to us. I actually received my book in the mail today, the day it's all due! She talked about how beautiful the illustrations were in this book and she was right. The book is about the first few days when God made the earth. The story is told from the illustrator's daughter, because he wanted it be more of a child's perspective and easier to understand for children. The illustrations are made from acrylic paint on watercolor paper. It looks like the paint was applied very heavily.
I also was able to get my individual books read and reviewed and posted to the wiki space. I think that was a neat way of reviewing books. Now we can just look under our chapter and read the review that someone else has put on that book. I am really starting to enjoy this class. I love all of the fictional children's book reading that we are having to do! Now tonight I have to present one of the book that I chose for my individual readings. My choices are Noah's Ark, by Jerry Pinkney(great book), The case of the Fidgety Fox, by Cynthia Rylant (silly book), and Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, by Eleanor Coerr (emotional book). I chose to present the Paper crane book. I actually cried in this book. It was very touching. More to come later....

Chapters 4-6

Tonight I met with my group to discuss our books that we chose for chapters 4-6 in the textbook. We were only able to discuss two of our chosen books. We all had order one of them. We chose Cat in the Hat, By Dr. Seuss, A River Ran Wild, by Lynn Cherry and Light..I'm not sure of the author. I was chosen to get the ball running with our discussion on cat in the hat. I began with mentioning the rhythm of the book and how it gets stuck in your head. I said that it's a great tool for kids to learn how to read. We talked about the rhyming words and the minimal color and pictures on the pages help students to focus. Veronica brought up some neat things about the characters..like who did the fish represent. The fish didn't have a big role, but was an important authority figure in the book. We talked about kids imagination and how they lose that as they get older.
The next book was A River Ran Wild. We talked about how important and amazing it was that one person went to such great efforts to help clean up the Nashua River. We talked about how many people abuse the land we live on and do not take care of it.
We did get a little side tracked, and started talking about our own lives, like how my family and I can food. And I learned where Veronica is from and Noel's granny has cows. But we ended the session by saying the book made us think and reflect on our lives. We thought it would be neat to time travel. We had a good session.

Trying to stay on top of things!

It seems like my head is starting to spin with everything is due! Last night we had class in the AET zone b/c of the wonderful snow!! I was looking forward to the International Fair, but it was nice to sit at home in my PJ's while we had class on the Internet. We are planning to the Fair on te 17th. Last night we talked about Literature Circles. It reminded of what would go on in a book club. Basically we're picking books to read in different sections that we signed up for and discuss the books in the discussion board with our groups for that week. We also have to chose some books independently to read and give a 5 min. presentation to the class on the 17th. We did a practice round of the Lit. Circle. I got kind of confused at first and didn't understand the instructions...go figure. I didn't like having a time limit to type our thoughts and questions in the DB about the book we read. But of course we won't have time limits when we're doing this for real! Sometimes we'll meet F2F, or in chit chats, or on the discussion board. I'm excited about reading all of the differnt genres of books!!

Class has started full force!

That's right, full force! This weekend I have been working on my chapter readings and a power point presentation for the international fair. I didn't have power point, but I found a new program that allows me to make power points. My group for the international fair is PJ, Tina, and Crystal. Crystal is making the rubric and making a dessert, PJ is finding some info on Bolivian culture, Tina found the recipes and is making our main course, and I am doing the visual which is the power point. We chose ASU sister libray project. I have about 8 slides made so far with information about how it started and why it started. We were all a little confused about the project at first, but it's coming together now. The frustrating part of it all is, that the group has not met to chat on the zone and some don't check their emails enough to get updated on questions that others have!! It has been interesting to read about this project and to see how ASU has helped a worthy cause.