Now that you have had a chance to collaborate with your Lower School partner, write a paragraph in which you reflect on your experience working with your co-author. What was your experience receiving feedback from your partner? What were the challenges of listening to and inhabiting their perspective? How did you respond and adapt to the feedback they provided?
As always, be sure to point to specific examples in support of your observations. And continue working to incorporate sentence variety into your paragraphs.
My experience receiving feedback was challenging, however not in the way I anticipated it to be. When collaborating with my co-author I asked if she had suggestions as to how I could improve my story. She responded by saying that I could "change the words." When I asked if she could elaborate or give specifics, she revealed that she didn't actually want me to change anything about the story but was rather giving ways that I could improve it myself if I wanted to. This was challenging for me because I could not tell if I actually needed to make improvements or leave my story as it is. However, my difficulty with this suggestion came as a shock because I am sure many of my peers would have loved to receive this feedback. It was maybe the best case scenario but I was still confused and struggling. I went home and almost stared at my story for a few minutes. I tried to picture being a kindergartner and I realized a couple of things. The first was that I remembered that as I was reading the story to her she was imagining the characters differently than I had when I had written the story. I went through and made few changes having to do with the characters personalities. For example, Ida transformed from just being a manipulative woman to being an evil witch. I made this adjustment because as I recalled our meeting, I remembered her referring to Ida as a witch even though she was never called that in the book. I made changes like this that way the story was more accessible to the kindergartners. The other thing I realized after analyzing the details of our meeting was that similar to my earlier point she had turned Prince Benjamin into the antagonist. I had written the story with him as one of the protagonists but I realized that in my shortening of the story I did not give a good enough description of him. This led to the my kindergartner imagining him as an evil man rather than just a slightly pompous price as I had imagined him. This resulted in my slightly altering his description but also changing the end of the story. I tried to add more positive descriptions of the Prince and they went from kissing in the falling action to just hugging and thanking each other. However, in the end, they still do get married
ReplyDeleteToday during class we had our second collaboration with our kindergarteners. Even though this was our second day of collaboration, this was the first day that I collaborated. My kindergartner (Bruce) during the last meetings was out, so this was my first interaction with him. Along with this, my kindergarten from Friday, Molly, (Lucy’s kindergartener) told me that I did not have to change anything in my story, so I could not edit my story. That being said, we did a lot today. During this meeting, I was able to read my story to my kindergartner and work on the story illustration. I felt that the collaboration went fairly well, but I felt that we started out slowly. I think that this could be accredited to this class period being our first interaction. Since this was our first interaction, I was not able to come to class with the kindergarten edited version of the story, so I had to explain a lot of my story to my kindergarten. For example, I had to explain where Japan was and what a samurai was. Bruce’s lack of knowledge of the topic lead to interesting illustrations, which I love and are great. For example, Bruce drew the main character of my story (a samurai named Ryota Asano) as a three eyed monster with spikes on its sides, and the main character’s uncle as a dinosaur with a large tooth. As you can probably guess, this was not what I was expecting for my illustrations. After the initial shock of the illustrations, I was able to quickly recover, and we drew the characters as Bruce envisioned. Even though the illustrations did not go how I thought they were, I think that this showed me how things will not go my way. In general, I would usually do whatever Bruce told me to do, or let Bruce draw what he wanted on the paper. I feel that this let Bruce convey his point of view or perspective of my story more organically. This being said I feel that I did not really have trouble listening to Bruce’s point of view. Overall, I feel that the collaboration taught me a lot about both my story and myself.
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ReplyDeleteMy experience receiving feedback went very well. I was very pleased to find out that my partner really enjoyed my story. When I asked her if I should change anything in my story, she replied with no. She enjoyed my story the way it was and she didn't want me to change anything. This was a huge relief as I didn't want to change my story. The process of reviewing my story was rather boring as she was just stating what I expected a normal kindergarten girl to say. She said that her favorite character was Diana because she was a girl. She also said the story made her feel really happy. The process of coloring was fun. My kindergarten pal seemed to really enjoy drawing the character Sea and not Diana. This was most likely due to Sea being a more simple character as he is just a Sea Star. I think my partner got bored of drawing Diana after a while because initially, she gave Diana a really complicated design. After a while of drawing a complicated design, it becomes very tedious and boring. Something that I found interesting while drawing is how differently my Kindergarten pal and I envisioned Sea. She gave Sea a very flowery design. Initially, I had imagined Sea as just being a very ordinary starfish with very big and cute eyes. It's funny seeing how differently we imagined Sea. Overall, my experience collaborating with the Kindergarteners has worked out very well. In the end, I was left feeling happy and excited for future collaborations with the Kindergarteners.
ReplyDeleteMy experience with my co-author was incredibly different than I originally anticipated. When I first met Alexis, my partner, I tried to get her to be more comfortable with me as she seemed like a shy and passive person. I asked her questions about herself, like what her favorite color, food, and book was. Afterwards, she seemed a bit more comfortable and I began to read my story to her. Alexis didn’t have any sort of commentary while I was reading my story, which was surprising to me because I imagined my kindergartner to be a bit distracted and disruptive, as many children her age are. But the whole time, she seemed very focused and calm. After I finished, I asked her if she had any feedback and she quietly responded with “no”, acting passive when she clearly had something to say. After some persistent attempts to get feedback, Alexis told me to add another character. Those very vague directions made it hard for me to incorporate the new character in a way that made my co-author happy with what I took from her feedback. When I asked her to specify, she told me that her name should be Eloise and that she would be friends with my two main characters. After I finished reading my story, we began to illustrate every slide. While that happened, I noticed that she would draw happy expressions on the character’s faces when I interpreted and wrote it as a sad scene, and when I asked her why she drew the character with that emotion, she provided surprising answers. For example, a scene in my story is when a character’s husband is calling his sister-in-law to tell her that her sister has left the country with no explanation. For this scene, she drew a happy husband and when I asked her why she did, she said “because he still has his children”. This showed me that the way the story was written was being interpreted incredibly differently than my original intentions. Overall, the experience with Alexis showed me how I should write in a simpler way for younger age groups to make the reader understand it as well as possible.
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ReplyDeleteWorking with my lower school partner was not what I expected. I expected to have either a very quiet kinder-gardener, or a very loud one who would remain unfocused. But my lower school partner was a good listener and would still engage in a conversation with me, making the collaborative process much easier. There were only a few moments when we would get distracted from our work process. This was mostly due to my lower school partner’s eagerness for the coloring/drawing part. He would tell me what he could draw then would proceed by showing me how to draw it. The only other challenge was getting direct feedback from him. When I asked him if there was anything I should change in the story, he said “Add more pages,” which I am not allowed to do. This was a bit frustrating since this was the only feedback I was given. I was able learn what minor adjustments to make to my story from listening to his interpretation of the story and his questions about it. For example, he was confused on why the Princess was mad at the kingdom because my more story did not state it clearly enough for him. I made adjustments like this to simplify the story so he would be able to understand it better. The overall collaboration went very well, and I am very excited to get to work with him again.
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ReplyDeleteWorking with my kindergartner was surprisingly easy. We did however have a couple communication problems. He would want to go play with some colored pencils while I began to draw, and I had to refocus him plenty. He also believed for the first few minutes that we would be illustrating Babar, the children's book that I brought in for the first meeting. Once we refocused, though, we were able to feed off each others ideas for backgrounds and character thoughts (I did most of the adapting ideas to his). We were quite efficient when drawing, getting two slides and one sketch done. I believe that we worked through our differences well, and I am looking forward to our next meeting.
ReplyDeleteMy partner gave me almost no feedback which made it very hard for me to adapt my story. Ike was quiet mostly which meant I had to pay attention to the few things he said to get a better idea of what he wanted. I figured out that the story wasn't very detailed and went very quickly, so I made it more detailed. I didn't have much trouble inhabiting his perspective. He said he loved to draw, so I just let him do all the art he wanted. I had to think about how he wanted to spend our time.
ReplyDeleteWorking with my kindergartner was very fun and enjoyable. I did not get any feedback from my co-author, so we jumped right into coloring. I faced some small difficulties during this process. One was that my kindergartener gott very distracted. So to accommodate I had to find a way to make her more interested in the drawing. I would ask her questions about what color she wanted to make the animals. This would help but sometimes we would just have to take a break. This did slow down the process a little but it was fun! I also enjoyed taking a break. My kindergartener was very energetic, creative and funny. Overall working with her was an awesome experience and I can not wait to work with her again.
ReplyDeleteWorking with the kindergarteners to better our stories yielded more success and enjoyment than I ever anticipated. The opportunity to step inside the mind of a child and receive honest feedback from the very audience our stories were intended for was a fruitful experience indeed. Not only was a able to truly adapt the story for a younger audience, but I also had a great time doing so. However there were a few aspects of the collaboration that could have gone more smoothly. Lack of focus and close-mindedness were the most common themes of frustration. It often took several minutes to get on track and begin our work, and breaks were to be had every few minutes. Molly's general resistance and close-mindedness manifested itself in the illustrational process. While writing the tale, I had envisioned lots of symbolism used in the drawings to help convey themes of the original tale more effectively; however Molly was eager to draw out each page quite literally, which ended up working out just fine in the end.
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