A Hop Through Time with Me

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 du...

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...

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...