A Hop Through Time with Me

Today in class we held a a mock interview of what it would be like getting job in the education field.  We had four administrators: Mikayla, Kelly, Rebecca, and Alisha. Each admisntrator represented different schools and they went around asking us questions. I had an easy time reflecting on my experiences in fieldwork and my philopshy of teaching to answer the questions, but there were some challenging questions that were asked. When Alisha asked me about the five elements of teaching I found it difficult to pick the three that provided the most powerful experience during teaching. Some questions that I had fun answering were if I was a superhero for education who would I be, and I choose Question because he is the best investigator and he gives a perfect example of how to use INQUIRY !  Overall I thought this mock trail was a lot of fun I liked ending the semester with this project.  I really liked this project because everyone took their roles very seriously. I thought it wa

Last year I briefly got to see an artifact bag with Dr. Smirnova, but today we got to actually work on this activity. I was very excited to see how this activity would turn out. First Dr. Smirnova gave us her own artifact bag and I was able to find out what her artifact bag was through the google photo search and google translate. The artifact that Dr. Smirnova gave us were a Russian Khokhloma Spoon, a PHD of Science Diploma of the USSR, and a Painting of a Birch Tree. My group and I were able to come to the conclusion that all of these things representations of Dr. Smirnova's past in Russia and how proud she is of where she came form. Once we did Dr. Smirnova's artifact bag we were able to break up individually and create our own artifact bag based on our unit plan. I did my artifact bag as an introduction to my unit plan and here are some of my figurines: I choose these artifacts to represent the early U.S. history because Thomas Jefferson becomes president dur

Like I have said in my previous posts I love cooperative learning and this week we got to learn more about cooperative learning ! In class we were able to learn about the number heads together structure of cooperative learning by actually doing it through a jigsaw. There are two types of jigsaws: 1: when you break into expert groups and then go to teach your base group. 2: There are expert groups and then they teach to the whole class. Our first jigsaw project we broke into expert groups and then taught to our based groups. The topic we were working on was the components of PIGS. PIGS stands for  positive interdependence, individual accountability, group processing, social skills and face to face interaction. When the components of PIGS is present you are seeing real cooperative learning !  My expert group focused on social skills and face to face interaction you can check out my presentation below ! I really enjoyed working on this because at first I thought the concept was a li

As relaxing as it to be done teaching it is always bittersweet. This semester I really enjoyed teaching and my majors history, so using the knowledge I have from my classes were great ! Working with fifth graders at first seemed very intimidating and I thought it would be challenging to challenge them, but it really wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I really enjoyed the opportunity to teach of implementing a cooperative lesson plan. Out of all three lesson plans I think our cooperative lesson plan was the best. I really enjoyed being able to work with the kids in a small group and I loved watching them incorporate their own uniqueness and creativity. As I went through fieldwork I learned the importance of implementing a cooperative lesson plan effectively. I felt that having pre-made groups and roles decided was a very strong instructional decision because it saved more time for instruction and for group work. In addition I felt by having roles and a contract made everyone

Today was the big day ! Today was my groups last day teaching and I was so excited because in my opinion the cooperative lesson plan was the best. As a cooperative lesson my group and I decided to hold and election for all the key people are unit plan goes over. Our election consisted of Thomas Jefferson, William Clark, Meriwether Lewis, Sacagawea, and John Adams. For today's lesson my group and I were expecting the students to make a campaign poster to promote their candidate that consisted of:  a catchy slogan, the candidate's political party, visuals, three reasons why their candidate should be president, one diss comment, and a catchy slogan. For the purposes of this lesson plan everyone had a role to play that we assigned to our pre-made groups. Each group had a facilitator, a note taker, a presenter, a monitor, and a helper. Before we broke up into groups we first showed our students an example of what we were looking for to set expectations. The example we made was bas

An inquiry lesson plan is made up of the 5 E's: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. On the contrary to many beliefs the 5 E's can even been used in Social Studies. At this idea I was a little shocked and I was really concerned about creating an inquiry lesson for Social Studies, but it was actually a lot easier than I thought ! As an inquiry lesson my group and I included a lot of technology in our lesson because it only seemed fit. We began our lesson with a review using a wordcloud. Our students recognized William Clark, Meriwether Lewis, Exploreres, and Scientist which was a great start to our lesson plan. Then we did a quick review of Lewis and Clark because our whole inquiry lesson was about their expedition through the Louisiana Territory. We started with a Voki which gave the directions, Lewis explains to the kids that something went wrong with time and the students had to help Lewis and Clark relearn about the land. Our students were broken into g