UNIVERSITY OF PUERTO RICO AT HUMACAO ENGLISH DEPARTMENT EDPE 4006 Practice Teaching Eliezer Morales Ruiz.

. Reflection: CREATIVITY Toward the practice teaching journey I have been able to embrace creativity in almost every lesson and topic. Specially, creativity was embraced with creative writing. My students learned to write creatively since the beginning of the semester with the topic of Sentence Structure that Mr. Bonkosky taught them. With this topic they learned to compose and create complete sentences. They had as one of the evaluations of this topic, to make a foldable that contained the definitions and examples of each type of sentence structure. They had to create their own sentence examples and were free to decorate and color their foldable. Then on February, the students were introduced to the topic of Poetry. On this unit, the students work with identifying figurative language in poems and styles of poems. As one of the assessments of this unit, the students had to create and design different kinds of poems, from topics of their preference. As I corrected their works, I was amazed by their creativity and how some of them got inspired to do their works. They had to handle the compilation of poems in a poetry book made by them. Their poetry books were evaluated in their presentation and creativity. Some of them made drawings and decorated their books with color and stickers. Even some of them got very inspired and decided to make poems for their friends as we were celebrating the moth of friendship and love. On March, the students embraced their creativity by creating and designing a reflective journal of one week. The students had this assignment based on the play they read about The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank was a Jewish girl that suffered the persecution of the Nazis Dr. Anbal Muoz

on Europe, 1933. The life of Anne and her family was in danger and they got forced to hide for almost two years. While she was hiding, she wrote a diary that narrated all the experiences she was going through. So, the students had the same experience that Anne Frank had, to narrate their live experiences in a journal and the results were amazing. Some shared more things than others. But at the end of the journal, some of them wrote that the experience of writing the things they do on their daily basis was more fun that what they thought it was going to be. As part of the evaluation, they had to come with a name for their journals, because Anne Frank also had a name for her diary (Kitty). Some of them got very creative with the names they put to their diaries and also some of them made drawings and glue pictures related to their narrations. By the month of April, my students had to be creative by writing essays about topics of their choice. As part of this unit, the students learned about the format of writing an essay and the different kinds of essays. As the final evaluation of this unit, the students had to choose a type of essay and write about a topic of their choice. The results were amazing, although some struggled to deliver their message clearly as I guide them through the writing process. They topics they brought were really interesting and they got the opportunity to share them with the class in an oral report about their essays. In conclusion, I was able to see and evidence my students creativity almost every single day. On May, my students were able to design and create comic strips about the folk tale Aunty Misery by Judith Ortiz Cofer. The way each one of them portrait the story was very original and some of them added a little sense of humor. Most of the works were display in the classroom corner board of their group. They all were very proud about their works and I believe they had fun in the process all the way. I know that as individuals, they will be able to express the world that there are no limits to our imagination and the power of being ourselves in everything we do.