Guest Post: Alter Egos

The following post comes to you from Brittany Goza, a teacher in South Carolina. Here's a little bit about her:
Brittany Goza graduated from Columbia College in 2011 and teaches English I and English II in a dropout prevention program called C3 in the School District of Pickens County. Before teaching English, she taught ESOL K-12 in Spartanburg District 1; Brittany has presented literacy based content at two national conventions and partners with two other English teachers in maintaining an educational blog. Brittany also trains teachers on new district technology initiatives.  She has always been passionate about learning and reading; young adult literature is her favorite genre. Brittany has a passion for traveling and learning new languages; she speaks Spanish and is taking a group of students to Spain in the spring of 2015! Check out her blog here.

Creating Alter Egos: Project by Brittany Goza

In our program, we have a lot of freedom to plan diverse curriculum to meet the needs of our students as well as engage them. We ( one math teacher and two English teachers) are working together in a unit designed around scale/proportional drawings in math and alter egos. Our inspiration came from an article in Scholastic magazine entitled “Create Your Alter Ego” (to access this site, your school must have a Scholastic subscription).

From this article, in the English classes, we began discussing what an alter ego is and we looked at some very popular examples of people who have alter egos using Prezi. In my English I class, we are reading The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, a dystopian novel, so in the vain of teaching genres, students were required to create a fictional dystopian society guided by this Prezi. The main character in the student’s story is supposed to be their alter ego, so students created Facebook page profiles to describe their alter ego. Creating the alter egos has been a unique way to teach character traits and direct/indirect characterization. To prepare students for 3D models in math, we read “Create Your Alter Ego” from Scholastic.

We are very focused on literacy across the curriculum, so in math class, students read another article from Scholastic called “Printing in 3D”   to get ready for sculpting their alter egos. But, before any sculpting could be done, students had to learn about proportional and scale drawings. Our math teacher has “flipped” her classroom, so all of her lessons about proportional drawings can be found on her YouTube page. Students have access to these lessons outside of school. After learning about scale drawings, students practiced with cartoon drawings before taking a picture of themselves to draw for their alter ego proportional drawing. Next, students will follow the steps in the Scholastic magazine and Mrs. Gilstrap’s flipped videos on YouTube to create their 3D models using wire, tin foil, and a salt sculpting dough. After sculpting their alter egos, students will paint their alter egos to match the character they have created in the English class.

The next step will be to make a comic strip using student stories and 3D sculptures.

Researching alter egos.

Drawing his alter ego.

Focused on figuring out how to draw 3D sculptures.

Mrs. Gilstrap recording a flipped lesson.

scale drawing of my alter ego

Reading Scholastic magazine to learn about 3D sculptures.

Mixing our flour/ salt dough.

Working to sculpt her 3D figure.

About to place the clay around the tin figure.

Wire/tin foil sculpture

3D sculpture

Mrs. G microwaving 3D figures.

The picture below is the comic strip that was created after students wrote their dystopian short stories.

To create the comic strip, students completed the following steps:

1.Learn what an alter-ego was.

2. Choose a social issue that their alter-ego could solve.

3. Write a dystopian short stories and create a 3D sculptures of alter ego.

4. Peer edit the dystopian short stories.

5. Create a hand-drawn story board using 6+ panels to tell the dystopian short story in comic book fashion.   ***Students were required to have at least 6 captions and 4 word bubbles in order to accurately paraphrase and summarize their short story.

Thanks so much to Brittany for sharing her ideas! It's awesome to collaborate with teachers all over the world, and especially in South Carolina where I went to school and began teaching. I'll be back with more book reviews and lesson plan ideas soon.