Reflection 7: July 4, 2012

Wow!  were those presentations amazing.  I had a difficult time deciding which ones to actually choose for my discussion.  After reading the topics for 2011's DI, I chose to look at many different age groups, including the really young ones.  I liked learning about bugs and how these students really created a story for their presentation.  So fun!

I ended up choosing a couple middle school groups for my discussion.  I know that during class and in other peoples' disucssions, they mentioned that the high school and college level studetns were the ones that were easiest to understand.  I think that maybe the recordings made it more difficult for some younger groups to be understood.  I ended up finding the middle school students easy to understand and incredibly creative.  This leads me to the topic of creativity.  As we saw in the discussion and in class, there is no one definition for creativity.  It can mean many things to different people, including myself.  When descirbing how these groups were creative, I can only pick out specific points that I found creative.  I thought that the use of the random props was very creative: one group used a mop as an oar and two other group members were stretched out on the stage wiggling their bodies to imitate a boat on the water.  The most amazing part of all this is they only had 5 minutes to come up with these ideas.  The students were moving in sync to imitate the movement of the boat and the water.  This is not something they had advance knowledge of.  The other thing i noticed is how enthusiastic all the students were while participating and acting.  Improv is so difficult in my opinion, but they pulled everything off so easily and had so much fun in the process.  This was evident in their smiles and laughter before and after the presentations.

I hope to be able to participate in something like this with my students, and maybe my children as well.