Teaching Strategy of Creatring Mental

¶ … teaching strategy of creatring mental images. The writer examines the strategy through a lesson plan that focuses on a well-known children's literature book. There was one source used to complete this paper.

One of the most valuable teaching strategies available to teachers is the use of creating mental images. Whether it is math, science, history or reading that is being taught, if the teacher can create a lesson plan that allows the students to create mental images of the lesson, that lesson will be cemented into the minds of the students for a long time. During this particular exercise I chose the teaching strategy of creating a mental image and applied it to curriculum with a high-quality children's book of literature. I chose the strategy of creating a mental image because it is a strategy that I believe can be applied to all academic subjects. In addition, I believe it is a teaching strategy that can be used for all students regardless of their academic ability or their special needs.

THE LESSON

The book chosen was Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. I chose this book because of its high quality and the ability to incorporate teaching strategies into the lesson about this book. The book is about a boy who become flattened by accident and lives that way for quite awhile. He is mailed to visit friends in California, he saves the day for the town because of his ability to get into places regular people cannot and he can fly like a kite in the sky. Eventually he returns to normal and he and his brother become close again.

To create mental images of this story I had each child decorate a paper cut out of themselves and we sent them around the nation to various relatives. We asked the flat person recipient to take the flat children to the store, to work and on outings and send it back to us with a story and pictures about the flat person's adventures.

The lesson worked because the children received information from all over the world about where their flat person was able to go. He or she slid under doors, behind appliances, and hid from household pets because of the flatness. Some of the flat people ended up lost in the mail which created a visual image of the difficulties that Stanley faced during his time as a flat person.

We talked in class about the things a flat person would have trouble doing and the dangers that a flat person might encounter.

The parts of decorating and sending the flat person worked because it allowed children of all abilities and educational needs to become involved with the project and have a hands on approach to the story.

The areas where I feel the lesson was weak included the testing of the story comprehension through written testing. The children are still learning to correlate storylines to ideas and some of them had difficulty moving to the next strategy of teaching with regard to the story.

When I do this project next year I will incorporate some music that can relate to the story so that children can learn to imbed the story in their minds through the memory of lyrics and musical notes that go with it.

The children did grasp the concept of mental imaging as was evidenced in the discussions about their individual flat people and the adventures and difficulties they encountered on the trip.

During the lesson I learned that my children are more knowledgeable about the world than I thought they were. This was shown during the discussions of where the children hoped their flat people got to go on their adventures and many overseas and historical American areas were mentioned and explored.