Module 11: Blog Post 2

- A clown went to be with his bear that was given to him as a gift. He couldn't go to sleep because a show on the TV was about milking cows. So, he decided to get up and go to his chair where he found a mouse had been trapped in the mousetrap. Since I ran out of time, this was as far as I got on this exercise.

- This was a fun and interesting activity. I wasn't sure how it would go after reading the directions. When I first saw the pictures, I noticed how random they all were. My first thought was to correlate things together that would make some bit of sense (mouse and the mousetrap, etc.). After I correlated similar things together, I began writing. Whatever came to my mind as I grouped the pictures together, is what I wrote for my story. When I heard that 2 minutes were up, it felt like I had just started. Looking back at my story, it is pretty silly. Though it makes sense, it was harder to come up with than I had originally anticipated.

- In this activity I grouped things together through chunking, which allowed me to remember them better when I wrote my story. When you put words or in this case, pictures together in a story that flows, it is easier to read and connect them together. I remember in elementary school when we had to use context clues to figure out what words would go into place to finish sentences. I feel this exercise is doing something similar, with chunking pictures together. This storytelling strategy affects long-term memory because you are first recognizing the images that catch your attention, moving them to the working memory where you associate "like" images and chunk them together, and practice utilizing them through story-telling. Though this process happened very quickly, the thought and attention that went into the storytelling helps encode the information into long-term memory.