Candace Poovey

I really enjoyed doing this Internet Workshop.  It gave me an opportunity to see some activities that students may do for a workshop.  I didn’t realize how much information there was about the different types of pirates, such as the buccaneers or the freebooters.  I believe that elementary age students would find this information fascinating and would truly enjoy doing it.

I really enjoyed the article on Internet Workshops.  My mother is a technology teacher and I have seen her use them in her classroom from time to time.  The students really seem to enjoy it, because they are learning valuable information on a  specific topic.  They don’t have to waste their time looking for reputable websites because the websites are already made available to them for the workshop.

By the time we become well established teachers in the classroom, I believe that blogs are going to be a normal way of teaching our students.  Through blogs teachers can post important information for students to look at and/or read about that may not be available to them through a textbook article.

I also think blogs are critical for sharing information with the students parents.  Since everyone is “Going  Green”, blogging will be a great way to help out our environment, with less paper being printed for newsletters to send home to the kids.  Also, parents can access the blog to view work that their child has done in the classroom.  Students will feel a sense of pride knowing they have a “published” work on the internet.

If I were to walk into a classroom and see many different types of artifacts related to pirates it would definitely pique my curiosity.  I’m sure this was a terrific lead into the KWL chart.  The students should have been able to figure out what they would like to know about pirates based on the articles laid out before them.

I love the idea of having the notebook where each student can keep their own dictionary of pirate words and be able to reference back to what they are wanting to learn.  This would probably make it easier to check off things as you learn more information about a topic.  What If I Met a Pirate? makes answers to some of their questions readily available.

I really like the idea of the Double-Entry Diaries.  I think it helps the teacher see what the student is learning from the text read, and it also lets them put their thoughts about what is read on paper.  When using the Data Retrieval Chart, it gives students the opportunity to learn about citing where they got their information.  This will come in handy in later years when they start doing bibliographies, or work cited pages.  I had never thought about using tea bags or coffee grounds to make a Wanted poster look more authentic.  I  thought that was a really neat idea.  This unit was very easy to follow, and I liked how everything was laid out in just a few short pages.

I thought there were a lot of great ideas in this article for incorporating Social Studies trade books into the curriculum for those struggling readers.  One idea I really liked was when students are silently reading, they must take notes on what they’ve read, then get with a small group and discuss it.  I believe this will help struggling readers work on their comprehension skills.  It also keeps them from just saying they read the book and moving on to other activities.  I’m glad this article included a list of books that can be used in teaching Social Studies content.  This makes a teacher’s job much easier to know she can look at this list and pick something based on the topic to be covered and her student’s reading levels.

My favorite poem in this book was “Jeannie Had a Giggle.”  It reminded me of when I was younger in church with my cousins and how hard it was to try and stifle the giggles.  I enjoyed reading this book, because most of the stories were interesting.  I also liked looking at the pictures throughout the book.  Another poem I liked in this book was “Love That Boy”.   It made me think of Jack’s poem in Love That Dog, and how Myers had inspired him.

This book had a lot of cute poems in it.  One of the ones I liked was called “Frog.”  I especially liked this poem because it reminded me of my childhood.  When my brother and I went fishing with my dad we would always catch tadpoles in a drink bottle and bring them home to watch them grow.  I just thought about how we loved to observe them each and every day even those this poem wasn’t really about  the tadpole.  I thought the poems would be really great for children because they are so short and simple, yet some can have a greater meaning behind them, and some are very informative.

To begin this assignment,  I visited the website www.behindthename.com.  This website told me information I already knew about my name.  My name is found in the New Testament of the Bible in Acts Chapter 8, verse 27.  In this chapter, Candace is the queen of the Ethiopians.  It is said to mean “queen mother”.  Candace was made popular after the 1942 release of the Meet the Stewarts.  I also found that Candace means fire white, pure, and glowing.

On the website ww2.howmanyofme.com/search, I found out that there are 78,657 people in the United States with the first name Candace.  There are 794 people in the USA with my last name, Poovey.  There are one or fewer people in the US named Candace Poovey, so I would assume that means I am the only Candace Poovey in the United States.

My mom had always liked the name Candace and she hadn’t really heard a lot of people with that name.  My grandmother was afraid that I would be called Candy instead of Candace.  My mom told her that I probably wouldn’t be called Candy if no one around me called me that as I was growing up and she was right.  For the first twenty years of my life no one every called me Candy, until a friend’s handsome little boy Caleb started talking and he couldn’t pronounce Candace.  He is the only one who I have ever and will ever let call me Candy (except maybe his baby sister).  For my middle name, mom wanted me to have the same initials as her, CRP, minus her maiden name.  So she gave me the same middle name she has,  Renee.  I love my name because there are not very many people who have it.

I enjoyed this book, because it was a very easy read.  It was also very entertaining.   I loved how Jack was extremely concerned that no one would like his poems, so he never wanted his name on it.  It was interesting to see him progress throughout the book.  He went from a child who didn’t think he could write poetry (because poetry is for girls) to a child who was very well rehearsed in writing poems.  None of the poems that Jack wrote really rhymed any, and I think students need to know that a poem does not always have to rhyme.  They need to be shown examples of rhyming poems and some that don’t rhyme.  They also need to be shown simple poems that are just written about something interesting to the author.  Just like Jack’s poem about his dog, Sky, if a student can write about something that’s important to them the writing process will be much easier.