C4T Blog Summary of J.F. Hadley's Blog Posts

In the blogpost, Just Laugh ,the author describes a day in her classroom that took place shortly after returing from Christmas break. It was the last class of the day, and the author had students paired in groups to read together. What they were studying had to do with towns and cities in Africa, and as you may expect some of the names were very difficult to pronouce correctly.

As these students were trying to read to one another, they began to laugh at each other's pronounciation. The author was originally upset that the students were not taking the assignment seriously, and immediatly wanted to stop their laughing and bring them back on topic. After a moment this passed for the auhtor, and he saw this as a learning opportunity for his class. As the students read, he corrected their pronounciation and laughed along with them. This student-teacher interaction helped them remember what they were learning about, and they were also able to have fun along the way.
In the blog post, "What a Good Idea!" the author was describing a moment in one of her 7th grade classes that took place just before schools got out for Christmas break. It was right before her school was going to get out for Christmas, and her children were understandably roudy. She wanted to engage them in their geography lessons, but she did not want to be too strict since it was soon the be Christmas. She settled on a geography art project that she got from Nation Geographic. Her assignment was for the students to create different maps of Africa in what they believed to be its most perfect way. The class would vote at the end on which was the best. The students chose different themes: agriculture, population, states, government, one even chose rainfall. Her students were excited and began the assignment immediatly, she even allowed them to listen to music quietly. One student whom tended to question the need for work asked her why they were doing this. The teacher responded by saying that she wnated learning to be fun and working on maps seemed to be a good way to do that. The student surprised her by saying “Wow! I never realized you think about things like that! What a good idea!” The fact this this questioning student loved the activity made the teacher's day.