Reflection #10

This week we really focussed on creativity and how to get students more involved with in it. We read stories and played music to begin to understand how our students are going to be thinking and looking at things. Some of the different concepts we learned this week through the process were a certain form known as binary, which includes an "A" and "B", the verse and chorus. Another concept is timbre which is, tone quality, letting us know that everyone has a different sound to their voice. I think that this is important because as teachers we are going to need to realize that each of our students are going to have different qualities in both voice and other things and we need to understand how to bring about those qualities.
Part of what we did this week was story telling. One of the first stories that we read was about the three piglets. I don't exactly agree with the way this story was taught because the first time a single person read the story which was fine because the teacher said she would chose different people to read stories at different times. However, the next time we went through the story she assigned sounds in the story to people in the classroom. I feel though that if that is the case then you need to make sure that every student in the class is involved at a time because once you have students who feel that they are not needed in the group you will lose their attention and that is something hard to get back. Another story that we went through was about a girl who went on a listening walk and made sure to just listen to the sounds as she passed by and really look at the world. I think this was a fun story to learn about creativity with children because it had so many different options of sounds that children could learn to play with. One of the things that I believe is important to make sure that children understand about creativity is that there are no limits. Each child has different opinions and visions on things. There fore although to the "normal" world a pig may make a distinct voice different children may have different adaptations which is okay.
This to me is where student-centered learning comes into play. Children deserve to have all the freedom in the world to express themselves. Although children do need limitations and boundaries to clearly understand right and wrong at times it is a great thing when they chose to show their emotions. Creativity is one of the greatest gifts you can give a child and it has to be developed to the extreme how that child choses to because creativity is something that will always let them enjoy the world. I believe that student centered learning was greatly enhanced in this activity because children were given a specific sound they had to make however, they were able to use their voices and body parts however they needed to make the sound as real as they wanted it to be. Another way that it was enhanced was by having the different music instruments and allowing children to chose which one they felt best suited the sound intended. This allowed the students to best express themselves and it lets them feel like its okay to chose something that other people may not see as typical because they understand that other peers in their group may also chose something not typical as long as it is real to themselves.