A Hop Through Time with Me

The semester has ended and I have to say it was a pleasure being in Dr. Smirnova's class with my fellow colleagues. This class was an enriching experience and I am proud of all the hard work I put into this class. I have learned so many useful things I plan to incorporate into my future classroom. Dr. Smirnova not only pushed us to go further, but also to get the small easy details right.  I am grateful for how well I am being prepared for student teaching next semester. It was a pleasure meeting the students we got to work with and I am so happy I was able to contribute to giving these students an enriching experience with social studies. I have to say working with fifth graders was probably the most meaningful experience I had in this classroom. They require more challenging material and watching them learn and take ownership of their work was great ! In this class just like science methods I learned of a lot of new technologies I could use in the future like Nearpod and Mentime

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

Today was the big day ! Today was the first day my group and I got to teach the fifth grade glass about the young United States. My group and I spent so much time rehearsing and preparing I felt very confident going into the classroom. The students seemed very receptive to the idea of swag dollars and behaved very well in class. We began with our world cloud and the students knew a few words like cabinet and federalists. During the lesson plan I got to teach the students about how Britain and France mistreated the United States and effected their trade and also how the United States won the Battle of Tippecanoe. The video to introduce the War of 1812 was a big hit in the classroom and the students really enjoyed how we moved from talking to them from letting them watch a video on the information they were going to learn. I think out of the whole lesson plan my favorite part was the guided practice. As a guided practiced activity we created necklaces for the students to wear som

As group one gave their lesson plans my group, The Social Studies Super Stars,  worked very hard to be prepared for our lessons. We began working on our direct lesson plan first ! We all divided the work and then began planning our pre-assessment, guided practice, and independent practice. In order to assess our students knowledge as a pre-assessment we agreed to use a wordcloud because it would be engaging and we could control the shape of our cloud. Now coming up with a guided practice was a little difficult we all had great ideas but we weren't sure what exactly we wanted to do. When we finally chose an idea we decided to do a vocabulary matching game. As our independent practice we decided to have the students to make a tweet about what they would learn about and use the vocabulary words we would teach. We worked on making enough copies for everyone and created rubrics for them. Once we created our direct lesson plan creating our inquiry and collaborative lesson plans were easy

Throughout all of group one's lesson plans they had great time management skills ! and they did not fail to manage time during their cooperative lesson plan. When my group teaches next I hope we can manage our time just as well. Today when the teachers taught I did not really like their video because I did not see how it related to being a pre-assessment. For the purposes of todays activities I like how group one shared a poem on teamwork rather than just going through the team work rules. There were two task and each group was given one of the task. Group one and three wrote a poem and group tow and four created their own Bill of Rights. Each group was given time to present their poem or bill of rights. It was obvious that the groups really enjoyed this lesson ! Group three wrote a rap rather than poem to and it was amazing !! In regards to the group dynamics's while they were working I think group one did a great job managing their time and classroom; they pre-assigned roles

Today group one taught their inquiry lesson ! Unfortunately I spent the whole week in bed with strep and the flu, but I was able to watch their video. The lesson began with a pre-assessment of their knowledge with a Kahoot! I noticed that the classroom got a little out of hand and setting up the iPads took a lot of time. Although the kids got a little crazy, I feel that group one did the best they could to manage them. The class was so happy to be able to do a Kahoot! so that was great. The focus of group ones inquiry was that the Bill of Rights went missing and it was up to the students to find it through a web quest. Students were put in groups, but they worked independently. After this students gather their information they were able to share it with their groups. During this time the teachers did a great job managing the students behavior and keeping everyone on task. I really liked how at the end to tie everything together the teachers had the students write to their newspaper b

Today I watched my peers begin to teach U.S. history with our students. At first there were some technical difficulties but group one resolved everything quickly ! I really enjoyed the beginning of the lesson because everyone did a great job setting the expectations they had for the students. In addition to setting the expectations in order to promote behavior management throughout the lesson the teachers offered the beat the teacher game and a prize if they students can continue to behave throughout their lesson plans. In addition I liked the use of the American flag to signal important information and the explanation of the note sheets the students would be using.  I really enjoyed how engaging the teachers were and how they really made an effort to get everyone involved. They gave a lot of opportunities for the students to be involved and engaged ! I enjoyed how they gave opportunities for the students to repeat after them, but I wished they had offered different checks for und

Today was our first official day in the classroom ! I was so excited to meet the students I would be teaching. In fieldwork our main goal was to really get to know our students, their interests, their weaknesses, and their strengths. My group and I prepared a board game with different colored cards representing different types of questions. We had red cards which represented our Are you a Social Studies Super Star which contained different social studies questions, blue cards which represented All About Me! giving us an opportunity to ask our students question to learn more about them, and green cards which represented Get to Know Us ! which gave our students an opportunity to ask us any questions to learn about their future teachers. All of students seem to enjoy our game and they really liked having the opportunity to ask us questions. When our students got a social studies question a lot of our students were knowledgeable, but I found it interesting that a lot of our students did no

I love looking at everyone's digitalme projects ! Seeing how creative everyone can be is always for me because I am not very creative. I also enjoy seeing all the different types of technology everyone uses because it provides ideas for me and my future work with students.  During the digitalme project we are looking for a:                               - An introduction                                - Voice projection                                                                -A development                                 - Good posture                    - A conclusion                                   - An explanation of the technology used AND AVOIDING GUYS !!  The first unfamiliar tool I saw was nearpod created by Abbie Altomare you can see her blog here . I loved how we really got to know her and how she explained all the different ways this tool could be used like: an exit ticket, a way to assess yourself, and to teach vocabulary. I loved my peer Mikayla

When Dr. Smirnova announced that we were going through the monster known as our eclass section I was glad she was going to show us all the resources and materials available to us because it can be a little overwhelming to go through it without any guidance. When I was going through eclass in Science Methods there was so much information that was helpful to me, but I did miss some other resources that could've been useful if I had know where they were on eclass. Going through eclass with Dr. Smirnova was a relief and she showed us materials that I did not see last night. I feel like my Social Studies folder is very organized and I feel very prepared to start fieldwork. I am very excited to start utilizing the articles Dr. Smirnova has offered like the various ways to grab attention and how to give effective feedback. The other half of the class was spent making our blogs and efolios which I enjoy doing because as Dr. Smirnova says we live in a digital age. We have so much technolo

Today was a great day back ! I was very excited to see Dr. Smirnova and my peers in Social Studies Methods. When I got to class I noticed there were a few people I did not recognize which made me excited to start our get to know me activity with Dr. Smirnova. This get to know me activity was different from the ones in my other classes. This activity began was visualization and then we wrote about the teacher we imagined, three qualities we think a social studies teacher should have, and what we believed social studies is. Going through this experience brought me back to high school with my global history teacher Ms. Panzer. I was already very interested in the topic but she made the material engaging and provided multiple means of instruction. When I thought of the qualities a teacher should have I thought of: 1. Inquisitive because as a teacher we should want to learn more about what we are teaching.  2. A good sense of humor because in order to intrigue students we may have to