C4T #1 Dare To Care

Dare To Care is a blog written by a current kindergarten teacher, Denise Krebs.

Summary Post 1.
In her latest post Finding My Way in the Kindergarten Genius Hour Denise shares about her experience of transitioning from teaching secondary levels of education to teaching kindergarten. Something that Denise loved and her students in 7th and 8th grade loved was a portion of class called Genius Hour, the main goal of genius hour is to give the students FREEDOM! The students decide what they want to learn; surprisingly enough, the students typically get very involved into projects and many become inventors during this time. Mrs. Denise brought this tradition of Genius Hour into her new kindergarten class hoping it might produce the same great feedback as when she did it with her older student. She was right! The young six-year-olds had an academic blast with this hour. Some examples of projects created by the children are a couch and chair made from recycled soda bottles.

My Comment Post 1.
I’m a student at the University of South Alabama as well, I absolutely enjoyed reading your thoughts and insights as an educator in the classroom, I think it’s so great that you've encouraged these young children to expanded their imaginations and let them become mini inventors. I’ve recently started blogging as a requirement for one of my courses, EDM 310, I will definitely continue blogging as a student teacher and then as a teacher and I’ll save your site so I can spark ideas.http://spiccianijustineedm310.blogspot.com/ This is my blog for my EDM310 class if you’d like to view it.

Summary Post 2
The second post I read was Reading About Learning, Brains and Metacognition. In Denise's post she starts out talking about Metacognition, this was my first time learning about metacognition. Denise defines it as "thinking about thinking" in a dictionary it is defined as " Awareness and understanding of ones own thought processes" (Webster). The main point of Denise's post to share about how greatly her teaching methods were impacted when she realized it was very crucial that her students think about their own thinking and thought processes as they read.

My Comment Post 2. (The "leave a Reply" button wouldn't work for me, but if I was able to comment I would have said,
Hi Denise, thanks so much for visiting my blog and commenting. I hope you're doing well, I found this post about Metacognition to be very interesting! You most certainly brought up a crucial point about the importance of recognizing and analyzing our thought process while we think. The link you included, 12 Questions to Promote Self-Knowledge in Students was refreshing, I honestly think these questions are ideal for any person to ask themselves,
Justine.