We began with VTS by Ms F again today. I was responsible for taking video of the VTS with Ms F’s iPad. This was the first time I’d taken any video with an iPad, though it works exactly the same as the camera function of the iPhone and I’ve taken a lot of video with that. Even so, I don’t recall too much detail about the VTS this time and I think it’s because I was distracted by the intermediary. The iPhone is discrete and it’s easy to forget that you’re taking video with it sometimes; the iPad is a good deal more awkward to handle although I liked being able to frame the scene with the large screen. In any case, we’ll have to refer to the video for the details because I don’t have much to pull from memory here. We added the adjective word poster to the VTS activity as discussed during our meeting on 10/12 (interestingly, Ms F and Ms U came up with this addition at the same time that I was writing about wishing I’d had a list of adjectives for the boys during my last journal entry). I think this was a little difficult to incorporate at first, since most of what the boys were saying was very noun heavy but Ms F fished the adjectives out afterward and shifted the visual focus to them prior to the writing activity.
After VTS, we handed back the samurai hats that had been worked on during the last class and introduced the additive materials (feathers, yarn, pipe cleaners, stickers, etc). Many of the boys wanted to punch holes in their helmets in order to thread materials through as drapery or projectiles, so I turned the classroom three-hole punch into a makeshift single-punch tool. The results were a little unreliable, so it might be a good idea to scare up a single-hole model if we do something like this again. Many boys fashioned chin straps from the pipe cleaners and these added an excellent layer of authenticity to the completed helmets.
With about 15 minutes to go, we tried to move the boys away from adding (and fixing the already added) materials to the helmets and on to the writing activity. The boundaries for this transition were not very clear and at least a few boys only scrawled out a sentence or a phrase or two and quickly returned to the helmet creation. And several boys had to be asked repeatedly to write. I think a clear creative materials clean-up and transition to quiet writing would make for a more productive writing time. As it was, I spent a lot of time talking individually to boys, trying to get them to write or write more, meanwhile several of their peers were carrying on with helmet creation, so it was difficult to justify my persistence while the boundaries and expectations for the activities remained unclear. I also wonder if our writing prompt was not well developed enough, since it was basically just a return to the same prompt we’d used during our last meeting and the boys seemed unsure of what they were expected to add.
That said, I think the adjective poster was an excellent addition and the boys seemed to enjoy inventing additional adjectives to share with their peers.
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