WHAT WE DID
In the design lab when we were testing out and learning about what we were going to be doing with the students, I was unable to do the Virtual reality (VR) part of the activity due to me struggling with getting headaches from lots of time with screens, I was able to see the opening with Lucy drawing us in but I could not go further. I was luckily able to watch on the synced iPads what others were doing within the VR experience.
INSITUE TIME
During the actual insitue with the students got to move from place to place to hear the book be read aloud in 5 different chunks since the full book is a bit long to sit through in one go. I was at station 3 with another teacher candidate, and we read from when the wolves came out of the wall until the point where Lucy falls asleep with her pig puppet after retrieving it from the house. When we made it into the classroom after the readings were done we got to watch students using the VR and also students working on their booklets, very few seemed to have been doing the booklets and mostly seemed to be watching other people’s playing of the VR on the IPads.
MY THOUGHTS ON THE EXPERIENCE
I found myself honestly struggling with the VR portion of the day, I found it hard that during the VR there was very little interacting with the kids and with how many of us where in the classroom I could not really move around to see what others were doing or to go help the students who were not in VR. I found myself using my body as a traffic cone since the students were struggling with the idea that their peers who were in VR could not see them and that they should not be walking that close to the people in VR. I do feel like this was a very cool experience, but I do wish we had somewhere to spread out more, so we did not have so many people in just the 1 classroom.
CURRICULUM
In English language arts (ELA) 5 there is The big idea of Language and text can be a source of creativity and joy. The curricular competencies of Access information and ideas from a variety of sources and from prior knowledge to build understanding and Use a variety of comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading, listening, or viewing to guide inquiry and deepen understanding of text. These are used within our activity from the students having chances to interact with the story in many ways such as the read aloud and then the VR experience which are told in slightly different ways and different ways of enjoying a story. The students’ workbooks, even if not fully used by the students, were a source of students being able to use other strategies to comprehend the text even with having to learn the meaning of words that they may not have known before.
In ELA 6 there is the same big idea as ELA 5 and the curricular competencies that fit are Recognize an increasing range of text which includes the VR telling of the story as being a story just like the book itself.