Wow!!! I am so excited about completing this project after reading about all that it entails. I think that it is going to be so fun to do research on someone that you don’t know much about, and to be able to create some of the artifacts through genres will be fun and challenging at the same time.
The Moulton article was quiet interesting. When she started the article I thought that it was real neat how the teachers she talked about had tried some new approaches to teaching research skills. I really liked the I search paper. My favorite though was the multigenre project by Ramonos. I feel that through doing one of these projects the students will really benefit so much more than by doing just a boring research paper. I do feel however that the students that the writer was teaching really had a hard time understanding what they should be doing because Moulton went into the project without having any kind of example or a ready grading rubric. The students didn’t know what to expect and how their final project should look. Being that these students were going to be teachers I feel like they were probably like our class is about knowing every little thing that has to be done, how it should look, and when it is to be turned in. That is just how teachers and pre service teachers are.
After reading Writing without Boundaries I was really excited to see all the different genres that we will be able to incorporate into our multigenre project. I am probably going to do Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or Princess Grace Kelly. I haven’t really decided which one yet because I want to know more about both of them.
I think that the book is right there needs to be modeling of genres for the students in the genres that you expect them to use in their project. I was amazed by the examples of elementary school mutligenre projects that I saw in the book. They were so well put together. The definitions that the students gave at the beginning of chapter 1 were so well presented. When I first read them before I moved onto the rest of the reading I thought they were written by much older students. I was amazed when I found out they were elementary schools students. The fact that the students could sum the project up that well really showed me that you can teach the students about the different genres and how to put a presentation together and make it work. I know that it would be near impossible to do a project this size in kindergarten, but I know that you could still teach the students about the different genres by showing them examples such as the Jolly Postman (I love this book and always have, I have had it since I was in elementary school and have used it in my classrooms to talk about letters), and creating them together as a class. I really think that this chapter gave great detail on how to implement a project like this into the classroom.
