LEARNING!

      For homework we had to read a section of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out and then get in groups the next day that read the same thing we did. I read the portion called Genres of Participation which was about learning through social participations from the community, social groups, and shared cultural systems. When I read about this I thought it was interesting but true. I think that in a lot of cases we do learn based on others around us and the social situations that we are put into. We especially learn from the culture that we are born into and tend to grow up to become like the people who we learn from. I thought that reading this section of the article helped me to realize just how much we actually learn based on our social participation. We wrote down on our sheet that kids are active participants and I would definitely agree with that statement. When you are first learning things and haven't developed your own ways you learn based on the people around you and what you see them doing and saying. When you get older though you have your own opinions based on what you learned from others when you were younger and whether you added to what you learned or completely ignored it, you still learned different opinions and ways of how to do something when you were a kid.

     I think that this article ties into our lesson pretty well because it sort of shows us where creativity stems from. It also relates to hte string games because we learned how to do the string games from the people around us that knew how to do it and the people around us could have learned a while ago from the people around them. All of which relates to the fact that we learn based on social participation.

String Activity!

         January 9th was our first day of English with Lacy and to open the class up and get everything started we played with string. I thought it was really fun to act like kids again and relax some while also connecting the string game to the lesson. We got three sheets of paper from Lacy on how to make different kids of shapes. The first paper had directions to make the base. That was the easy one, the next two took a couple of attempts but with the help of people around me I got it down. The Cup and Saucer is what I did above and the last one was the owl's eye which looked pretty cool when I finally got it. I remember learning how to do these string games in middle school one day and I use to get so frustrated because I could never understand how to do it. When we did it in class I was having fun and eventually got it. It's kind of cool that someone figured out how to do this with string. Like I wonder what they were doing to figure that out, were they playing with string and just happened to make a cup and saucer or an eye's owl? MIND BLOWN. The base I can understand, but whoever figured out how to do all the other complicated tricks deserves some props. It's impressive how creative people can be, especially when all you have is a foot of string. 

I'm definitely glad we got to do this activity the first day of class. It made me think past the piece of string and  made me realize this is going to be an interesting class!