Peer Blogs!

During this class, I am not the only one that has had to create blogs. My peers have also been creating blogs. One of the tasks for this assignment is to provide feedback on two other classmates blogs.

I have written feedback on Brittney's blog that you may see here. I really enjoyed her blog about the artifact bag. Her pictures look very nice, and she connected the activity to learning standards which is great.

I also posted on Brianna's blog. I really enjoyed looking at her blog because it is so interactive and creative. It shows that she is a technology major, and that she really enjoys blogging as she had said in class previously. See my comment here!

The End! Final Blog! =(

I cannot believe that this semester is complete. Although this semester may have been one of my most stressful yet, I cannot say that I have not learned anything. Throughout this class, I have been introduced so many new technology tools, as well as new experiences. In this blog, I will simply go over my efforts for the class and the fieldwork experience.

Personally, when it comes to the planning for fieldwork, I had to begin to think outside of the box. How can I incorporate what needs to be incorporated, but in a fun and exciting way for students. It was very beneficial to work collaboratively with  my peers because it allowed a number of ideas to flow around and be discussed. It was a very stressful time period though because of the amount of time needed to plan, with the limited number of hours that I had. I was beginning to think that there were not enough hours in a day. On top of attending school full time, I also work full time. So after a long day at school, followed by a long night at work, I went home to finish up planning for fieldwork and reviewing what was needed for the lesson. It definitely became very tiring by the time I finished everything that needed to be done. That is what teachers do though! No matter the time, the work will always need to be finished.

As for my contributions to the lesson plans, I believe I did very well. Of course, there were times when it became tough to complete the assigned work, which led to very late nights. It was difficult for me because as I said before, when I am not in school, I am working. By the time I would start completing sections of the lesson plan for my group, it was very late at night. In turn, this upset my group members because they wanted it to be finished as soon as possible. I wanted to contribute more than I did throughout the planning process, but by the time I was able to get started, a number of the tasks were completed on the lesson plan.

I feel that we did work collaboratively though. Each lesson, we designated certain areas of the lesson plan for each person to complete. In the end, all the lessons were completed and implemented. One of the things that I wish we realized prior to writing the lessons, was the amount of time that we actually had to implement them. We were writing lesson plans that took a minimum of forty minutes, but we only had around 25 minutes to complete the lesson. In turn, this caused us to have to eliminate a number of sections of the lesson plans during the actual implementation.

This experience has given me insight on what it will be like when I have my own classroom full of students. It is important to incorporate a number of different kinds of lessons; direct, inquiry, and cooperative. Incorporating all three of these types of lessons will allow me to teach meaningful and powerful social studies that will be beneficial for all students.

**FIREWORKS**

Over the past few weeks of the semester, the class has been preparing and presenting different ways to teach lessons based on current events. It is important to teach meaningful and powerful social studies to students. Differentiating how current events are taught can create lessons that incorporate all of the characteristics needed to make learning meaningful and powerful.

My group consisted of me, Brittney, and Madison. We met in the beginning to come up with an idea for how we wanted to present the current event. We then worked together on Google Docs, and talked through group messages and after class time. We decided to create a lesson called “Sequencing the Facts”.



 

In this lesson, the students are to read an assigned current event article. After reading the article, the class would be broken up in half, and given a bag containing sentence strips and a posterboard. The students would then have to place the sentence strips in the correct order as they appear in the article. After completing this task, the student boards were compared to one another and the master board with the correct order displayed.

This lesson went very well, but I was upset about one thing. We had originally planned to read the article as a group, highlighting key details. Being that we were only able to use half of the amount of time that my peers had, we had to cut a lot of the lesson out. We were unable to read the article as a group which in turn, caused the sentence strips to be a little difficult.

Overall, I think having this was a great aspect of the class. Current events can sometimes be a tad bit boring, but being introduced to so many different ways to teach them is great. I have at least ten different ways to teach current events now because of this class.

Another Puzzle Piece!

Remember one of my previous blogs about jigsaws? Well, I have completed another one! This time, we were given a chance to research and become familiar with the different American Indian Tribes. We were first assigned base groups, and then we each chose a tribe to begin researching. We then, broke up into our expert groups and began researching. I chose to research the American Indian tribe known as the Seneca.

In my group, there were three of us. Dr. Smirnova had given us a PowerPoint template to use to create an organized and efficient presentation of our tribes. During the presentation, you had to focus on the following areas:

• History
• Geography
• Culture
• Language, religion, traditions, customs, songs, games, dances, toys, etc
• Clothes
• Food
• Habitat
• Famous People

After finishing research, we went back to our base groups and began presenting our findings to the groups. Completing this jigsaw has allowed me to see how beneficial it is to work with your peers and learn from your peers. Not only does this type of lesson build peer relationships, but it also allows students to have control of the classroom for once. Sometimes, students will learn more when they hear it from their peers rather than their teachers. It also provides the students with a fun and interesting activity.

I will most definitely be incorporating JIGSAWs into my classroom in the future. The great thing about them is that they are very flexible and they can be used in all subject areas. It is always a great thing to change up how instruction is delivered to students!

Last but Not Least!

Today was the last day of my teaching experience. The next time that I go to fieldwork I will be observing groups three and four implement their lessons. Today’s lesson was a cooperative learning activity for the students. The task was for the students to create a timeline that was chronologically correct. We began the lesson with a brief review of the major events leading up to the American Revolution. Each of us focused on one event. I was given the French and Indian War. When it was my turn to review the topic, I simply asked the students various questions about the war, trying to elicit answers that were taught in the first lesson. Surprisingly, the students retained a lot of the information that was presented. Each time I received an answer from the students I would provide them with positive or corrective feedback.  The other teacher candidates followed in the same fashion.

For the actual activity, we had to break the class up into four groups. Being that we wanted this activity to go smoothly, we had asked Mrs. Benfer to create a list of students who work well together. We then broke the class up into the assigned groups. Each group was given a picture of an event that we had already covered, and it was their task to figure out what event it was, and also complete the accompanying worksheet. The worksheet provided students with an outline that was used to summarize the details of the event. We decided that it would be most beneficial for the students if we worked with the group that was analyzing a picture of the event that we had taught. For example, I worked with the group who was covering the French and Indian War.

After the groups had completed their worksheet, the group then had to go to the front of the room to place their event in the correct space on the timeline and present their details from the worksheet. The lesson closed by reviewing the events and giving student a thank you note from George Washington for being such hard workers during the previous lesson.

 

My favorite part of this lesson was when Christina was reviewing the TEAM acronym. The TEAM acronym was made so that students could have something to refer back too when thinking about how to appropriately work collaboratively. Before displaying what we made each letter stand for, Christina elicited a number of responses from students to share what they felt each letter should be. The answers that students were sharing were great answers. It was very impressive to see how their brains work so quickly. This entire experience has been wonderful and I am very upset that my turn teaching has come to a close. I am also excited to see what the other groups have in store for the students.

Round Two for Fieldwork!

We have just completed our second session of fieldwork. In today’s lesson, we had the students complete an inquiry based assignment. The lesson began with a brief review of the first lesson to assess student knowledge. We then introduced the activity for the day using a Voki. The Voki was George Washington and he had a very special request for the students. The Voki said the following:

“Hello young Patriots! George Washington here. I have an important message and assignment for you! You will get three hints about a person who was very important during the American Revolution and they will appear on the screen of the iPads. It is your job to find out who the important person is. My assistants will instruct you how to decode the messages on the iPads that I am sending to you… historians, good luck!”

We briefly went over the directions with the student and modelled the activity they would be completing. The students were given an iPad with the QR Reader App installed on it, a worksheet, and a barcode. The students scanned the barcode, which brought up three facts about an individual who was important during the American Revolution. The students had to research the hints in order to determine the name of the individual. They had an accompanying worksheet that guided them through this process.

The good thing about how this lesson was completed was that the students were divided into four groups. Being that there were five of us teacher candidates, it allowed us to be able to work with the student groups to assess and support learning. As four of us were working with the groups individually, Christina continued to walk around the room, observing and asking questions to the students to analyze their learning. This allowed the lesson to move smoothly.

Lastly, we had the students present their findings to the class. Each group had identified their individual correctly. For homework, the students were given a worksheet that they would have to complete by creating a letter to George Washington summarizing their findings which will become a summative assessment for us teacher candidates.

All in all, this lesson went much smoother than the first lesson. We were definitely a lot more relaxed and comfortable in front of the class. Each teacher candidate had a significant role throughout the lesson which was completed successfully.

This process has been such a learning experience; a very beneficial one at that. From creating, to planning, to implementing, it has all been a great experience. It is very tedious and time consuming to plan lessons and create plans, but in the end, it is more than worth it. Being able to see the joy on the students’ faces when they are completing lessons and activities is more than fulfilling.

I am extremely happy because I am no longer nervous about implementing the lesson to the class as a whole, rather, I am excited. This whole experience has been a wonderful thing and I would not change it for the world.

 

First Fieldwork Experience

Hello again...

I have completed my first day of fieldwork! What a crazy experience; it was amazing, but crazy! Let me see if I can put my thoughts down on paper..

To start, the good thing about the way that this fieldwork was set up was that it provided us, future teachers, two opportunities to teach the same lesson. Being that the class was broken up into two groups, it allowed us to implement the lesson, learn from our mistakes, and correct the lesson the second time around. We would teach one half of the class first, while the other half was being taught by my peers, and then we would switch groups to teach the lesson again.

Our lesson went as planned; each event was able to be elaborated upon, but there was one issue. Time was against us! Being that the lessons that we had created were made for a forty minute class period, it was very difficult to try to fit the lesson into a twenty-five minute time period. We were able to incorporate each portion of the lesson, but I felt that if we had more time, the lesson could have been more beneficial for the students. For example, during the first lesson, we were so focused on time that we became nervous, and never went over the correct way to fill in the graphic organizer. But then, during the second lesson, we were so focused on going over the correct way to fill out the organizer that we did not spend as much time on the topic areas as we should have.

For myself, after viewing the video, I have realized so many things. One, I need to slow down. I need to learn how to pace my words, slow down my talking as I am trying to express knowledge to the students. Second, I need to be way more enthusiastic when I am teaching, as do my peers. I think that we were all so focused on making sure that we said the right things, and that we were not going over our time limit, that we just simply forgot why we were actually there. We were all so serious, making sure that we made each point that was intended. That emotion overcame the emotion of joy that we were all actually feeling at the time. Third, I think that no matter the time limit, we should always take our time. Granted, we are not actual teachers in our own classrooms who can use their time as they wish, but I feel that is something that should be remembered from this experience. Take your time!