Teaching: A Colorful Way of Learning
“Everyone has the ability to create beauty and everyone has the ability to destroy it.”
The world can be viewed in many different ways depending on who looks at it. I look at my classroom like a box of crayons. Inside are students with many stories to tell. They have many different goals, ideas, personalities, and dreams. My crayon box is a safe area where we can explore and learn together. I believe that through teamwork we can do anything, even gain the confidence and skills to learn separately while doing so, together. And the best part of all is that we are all individuals.
Every day is today, and today we are going to create a work of art. In the classroom I like to focus on the creative aspect. I believe that learning should always grab your interest, entertain you, and be unforgettable. Whoever has sat in a classroom that falls silent has experienced a loss of inspiration. I feel like students should always be motivated to learn more. I hope to engage students in their exploration in the classroom by inviting them to participate in assignments that interest them. It is my goal to make learning fun through hands-on creative learning and performing many experiments. I believe that everything you do should be meaningful to yourself in some way. I want to integrate the curriculum in each student’s life to make the material practical and useful to both education and student’s standards. If we study about the life cycle of a butterfly, we will go observe butterflies, read about butterflies, mold and model butterfly crafts, hopefully reaching all students’ unique learning styles.
I imagine a classroom where all students are given choices. The methods I use to get information across and relate it in ways that will get students interested and involved in the core curriculum will be based on each class individually. Because everybody learns at their own pace and in different ways, I hope to provide a variety of activities that will meet each student’s needs.
To learn and obtain information is like a dance. You can get joy from watching a dance performance, and you can gain new skills from it. Learning is like a dance. We can watch and observe it for a little bit, and then try it out ourselves, and finally create something new and incredibly ours. This dance is our individual style, it is how we learn and interact with the world around us. It is the steps we take to find information that can give us new experiences that will benefit out very lives. It is our motivation that keeps us going, striving, and learning.
Here are a few of my teaching methods:
Ask Questions! My method to gain answers is to question anything you want to learn more about. I want students to raise their hand and think about the subjects that they don’t understand. Students will probably gather more knowledge from each other than from general instruction. Exploration into the unknown is what I hope triggers their yearning to gather new information.
Reflect! Reflection will be a big part in my lesson plans. There is an abundance of information that gains new meaning when given the time to think about what it really means on a personal level. By keeping a journal in class and recording thoughts about journal prompts or assignments, I’ve found that it keeps students more motivated to memorize certain information and keep it with them. Reflecting also gets your brains turning, and a thought process going early in the morning.
Communicate! Communication in the classroom through teachers and peers is vital to understanding and absorbing new knowledge. Online access has opened new doors to teaching theories and student exploration/interest. With use of the internet and new technologies I hope to use it to get students more involved in deciding what is taught inside the classrooms. Through blogs, and online chat features, I hope to discover new interests, hopes, and goals that my students have in their personal lives. By making this information accessible through new ways of communication, it will be easier to understand what students wish to gain from an education.
As a teacher I make sure that testing has different styles, just as lessons have different styles. (Written tests, oral tests, projects, pop quizzes.) Student assessment is important to see how well my students are retaining the information that has been described. Now there are opportunities for assessment online through sites like Wikipedia. If a student can communicate the information to each other, then I feel like their learning about the subject is expertise! If you can teach a subject that means that you know it. There’s no higher education level than teaching. Once again, communication is one of the best ways we can learn about the world around us. Communicating through books gives us knowledge; communication through other people gives us new ideas. There are new opportunities in education when we broaden our level of communication, so I believe that being open for discussion will affect student’s learning.
Experiment — create 
Rubrics – evaluate
Concept Maps – Analyze
Wiki – Apply
Class Discussions – understand
Standardized Tests – remember
Learning is as diverse as people.
I think to create a successful classroom there has to be a belief that there are possibilities inside it.
As a teacher, I want to give each student the knowledge that they are indeed a human being. If they learn nothing else I hope for them to learn that each one of them has something to offer, and all of their opinions are important. I teach by the quote “They may forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” Information is important and learning is an important necessity, but those are only the bare structures that prepare students for the rest of their lives.
I hope to teach encouragement with great patience. I strive to pull reactions from students that they never knew they possessed and constantly show a belief that it is possible to understand anything you put your mind to. I want students to challenge themselves in activities they love. I want them to thrive and expect the best from themselves, realizing that there is always more ways to improve and to accept themselves for what they can do. Of course, anything worth doing usually has a challenge behind it, and I would like students to challenge themselves. Without hard work and discipline it’s impossible to grow. Without practice it’s impossible to become better.
Red; If we care about our students
Orange; Respect them as people
Yellow; effectively communicate with them on the level they are ready for.
Green; Express to them that their opinion matters
Blue; Be an example of Honesty, Fairness, Integrity, Trust.
Indigo; Make ourselves Flexible to change to their needs.
Violet; And make an effort to Understand each student and relate to them
Then we can teach.
Every color, Every Student, matters. Teach students what they need to know. Help them realize their dreams. Become someone your students can look up to. Believe that students are capable of directing their own learning to a certain extent. I think it’s important that a teacher can guide their learning, and have confidence that they will become capable of learning on their own. But a teacher gets their feet wet, opens the door, and introduces student’s to a brand new world.
Teaching is my art, students are the medium, and by working together we create an experience. This is my philosophy.
I look at my students like a box of crayons.
Curious and new.
Some are sharp and some are loud,
Some seem to get lost in the crowd.
There are those who are soft and explore pages of books, learning more each day,
And those that stand up and show off their colors and declare everything they want to say.
But all have one thing in common; they can make their dreams come true.
Together we can create a picture, a patchwork of shades and hues.
Each color is important, special, and unique.
And when we all work together, we can create a masterpiece.
Miss Cat's Classroom Website 