Part I:
Here is my Visualization Project on Immigration. It is a voice-thread about some of the big ideas from the book, "Homesick: My Own Story" by Jean Fritz.Part II:
Post
#3, Visualizing Understanding, was the most challenging blog posting assignment
for me. I thought about all of the things that the students would have learned
from the texts that we would have studied when chose Jean Fritz’s story, “Homesick:
My Own Story.” I wanted something that would deepen their understanding of
immigration and see it from another angle. I thought that learning about how
the Chinese people in the story acted toward and spoke to the American people was
a good comparison to how the American people here spoke about the Chinese
people. I think that it was also a good choice to relate the way people feel
about immigration today.
The
first thing that I did was reread the book. I had read it when it first came
out in 1982 or so. When I first thought of using this book, I didn’t think that
I would have to read it again. I remembered the gist of it, and I felt like
that would be enough information to make a voice thread about some of the
immigration related topics in the book I tried to visualize how I would proceed
with this project, but I didn’t have a clear enough picture. Rereading the book
finally helped to give some shape to the task at hand.
Visualizing
understanding deepened my understanding of this subject very much. I had to
know it very well in order to be able to do this project. Every picture chosen
and every word came after further research into my subject. When I read the
book I put little post-it notes on subjects of interest, so after I finished
the book I went back and thought about the ones that were the most important
and the ones that I thought would impact my 7th graders the most. I
wanted to give them information about it, but above all, I wanted to spark their
interest, so they will continue learning. There is so much to learn about this
time period, immigration, and how we think about things. I want my students to
be metacognitive about their beliefs and how they interpret the world. I very
much want them to know what ethnocentric means, so they can monitor their own
minds and make the world a better place.
Reading
this book alone would have been beneficial to my students, and they would have
learned some new things, but reading it and then studying little pieces of it
with this voice thread gave it more meaning. It took them away from Jean, the
main character, and directed their concentration to the circumstances that
shaped Jean’s experiences and history leading up to today. It greatly deepened
my comprehension as well because I had to learn as more than I thought I had to
in order to present it in a clear and organized way. This assignment showed me
the huge benefits of having my future students do projects using different ways
to present the material and to visualize what they have learned.
Fritz, Jean, and Margot Tomes. Homesick: My Own Story. New York: G.P. Putnam's
Sons, 1982. Print.
