Before doing book clubs in our class, I had never
participated in a book club. To be completely honest, I thought that only
sophisticated old ladies participated in book clubs. All of my teachers growing
stuck to the whole class reading the same book, but these book clubs aren’t too
different from that. We still get the good discussions and reflections, but I
like the book clubs because they’re smaller and each club gets to read a
different book. I think book clubs would be a good thing to incorporate in all classrooms,
not just language arts.
The book my book club is reading is Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliet, and I think
this book would be good for middle school math classes, most likely 6th
grade. It introduces topics about patterns and geometry and it also is
interesting to read and not all about math, so kids will like it. Unfortunately,
I think there would be some difficulties to be able to implement book clubs in
the curriculum. It would be hard to make time for them because the curriculum
is so structured and there is already not enough time to squeeze all the
material in the school year. I think that doing a book club would be better as
an extra credit project. (215)
When visiting the Georgia Museum of Art, I found a painting I really liked that nicely captures both science and art. The painting is called
Galapagos II by Rebecca Rutstein. The story behind her painting was that she
was on board a ship traveling from the Galapagos Islands to southern
California, and during the trip the boat was trailing a hurricane she created
this painting. She poured paint on the canvas and let the ships movement do the
work, and she worked with scientist who mapped the ocean floor with sonar
technology and put the data in her painting.
This would be a good painting to incorporate into my
classroom when learning about the ocean. It has actual data from sonar
technology from the oceans floor so this could be a good introduction for a
section about ocean geography. Also, I could have the students do an assignment
similar to how this painting was created and have them pour paint on a canvas
and move the canvas around in motions like the ocean rocking the ship and then
they can incorporate some scientific data on after. For example, they could
also do sonar technology data of the ocean floor, or migration patterns of
whales. (203)
