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**