A Hop Through Time with Me

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...

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            ...