By: Maria Bonaddio

Welcome back to my 3rd and last blog post! During this project, I have learned a lot that will help me in my teaching career. My research project is based off F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous book The Great Gatsby, which helps students learn about Jazz Age. Based off of all of the work I’ve done this semester, I feel I have progressed from when I began. From my first blog posts to now, my thinking has changed and become much more complex. My blog posts now actually help other readers/fellow teachers teach American literature to students. Most importantly, my posts now include ways to engage students and get them involved. I have progressed by including activities that incorporate multiple intelligences that are required of teachers to use in their lesson plans. I feel that since my first blog I have included many techniques that I and other teachers are able to use when teaching lesson plans. My lesson plans now include objectives, materials, procedures, adaptations, discussion questions, evaluation methods, extension activities and more. They also contain more descriptions that explain directions better for teachers. Overall, the activities designed are important because they are able to help students understand the author’s intentions and craft. This style of teaching allows students to discover the lessons and themes in a creative and interesting way.

From this project, I have learned so much more about the Jazz age as well The Great Gatsby. I have also learned and started to understand what grade I would like to teach, which is fifth grade. For fifth graders, I feel teachers can create lesson plans, like the ones Alyssa and I have, that are engaging and effective. I’ve learned how important creating lesson plans and activities are for your students. I’ve also learned that there are not always tools and resources to support what you are trying to teach. One of the challenges that Alyssa and I had was finding scholarly sources, but with enough research, we finally found effective and resourceful information. Another challenge that we came across was what intelligences we should connect to our project. Connecting our activities and making sure they followed the criteria of the selected intelligences was hard but extremely important. We wanted to make sure that the activities connected to the student’s way of learning in an enjoyable way. Overall, I found this project to be very helpful and beneficial and I myself would certainly be willing to do another project like this in the future.