The Young United States

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 some had vocabulary words and others had definitions of the words. The purpose of this activity was that each student had to find their match without talking. A lot of the students did very well during this activity and we only had two mismatch. In order to conclude our lesson plan the students had to create a tweet using at least five vocabulary words. Our direct instruction lesson plan went so great I am so proud of myself and my group !

Luckily not only was this a great experience, but it was also a great learning experience for me and my group as future teacher candidates. Some things we felt we needed to improve on was time magnement because we did run out of time, but we handled this well by trimming some portions of our lesson. Overall Dr. Smirnova enjoyed our lesson plan which was a huge relief ! In addition to looking at our peers feedback a common thing we saw was that they wished we used our Swag Dollars more. My group and I agreed we would pay attention to their behavior more to implement our Swag Dollars more effectively. 

Now that we have completed our direct instruction I look forward to accomplishing our inquiry lesson plan with the fifth grade because I know they will have a lot of fun with our learning centers. 

Check out my group member Anna's experience at fieldwork here !