A look back...

When you start a class you never know what you are going to take with you when it is over. You never know what impact the people in your class may have on you, or what impact you may have on them. You never know what impact your professor may have on you, or you on her.

This was my first graduate level class and I chose to take it at Mount Saint Mary. Most people that work at my school got their graduate degree online. I was not sure what I wanted to do when I first had to make my decision. I chose to come to Mount Saint Mary because I wanted the classroom experience. I wanted the discussions and activities that happen in an interactive classroom. So far I got all of those things at Mount Saint Mary.

One of the authors that came to visit and speak to our class was Lesa Cline Ransome. Here is her blog 

Here is a video of her speaking in our class.

This is her and her husband, who illustrates many of her books.
Another author that visited our class was KL Going.                             Here is her  blog

This is her speaking in the Villa library. 

Chuck Stead, a famous storyteller also visited. Here is a link to an article in the Hudson Valley Press Online about his visit. 

I chose to just show that authors that visited our class in my blog but there were many other aspects of the class that helped me to meet all of the objectives. These were genre presentations, author or illustrator presentation, creating a classroom text set, and many various classroom activities. 

Impersonation?

For grad class we had to pretend we were an author or illustrator and present to our class as if we were that person. At first I thought that it was crazy. Then we had two real authors come to speak to our class, and I thought that it was very interesting. I loved hearing about why they wrote certain things in the book and what was cut out of the book by their editors. 

For our class we research whatever author we choose and then present to our class as if we are the author. Here are some of my classmates presentations:

                            

Andrea Davis Pinkey

Patricia Polacco

       Joseph Bruchac