Reflection of Social Studies Methods

I can't believe how fast this semester flew by, its so bittersweet to be done with all of my methods courses and such an awarding feeling! Throughout the course of this semester I have reflected on my experiences in our Social Studies Methods course. I wrote a blog post just about every week expressing my feelings towards something we learned or writing about overwhelming, incredible experiences; like fieldwork. I also reflected on projects I created like the artifact bag, current events, and PIGS! I highly enjoyed writing my blog posts as it really forced me to dig deep into important social studies concepts that I can implement into my future teaching. I can now look back at the posts I wrote in the beginning of the semester to see how much I have improved and learned since then. I can even look back in a year or two from now and see a much greater improvement, which is very exciting! 

I chose the title "Shannon's Exploration Through Social Studies" because social studies is truly an exploration and I knew I was going to be exploring a lot about the subject. I was right because I learned so much about not only social studies, but TEACHING it good, which is so important to me right now as I am studying to be a teacher. Through exploring social studies, I have learned how to create different types of effective lesson plans, taught a class for the second time, implement these lesson plans into that class, learned a lot about EDTPA that will help me tremendously as I student teach next year, learned about numerous ways to integrate technology into a classroom and was introduced to a variety of different digital tools to use in a classroom one day. The list goes on and on, but I have learned so much from this course that I will take with me into my future teaching career that will help me create success among all of my students. I enjoyed exploring through science so much this semester and I cannot wait to explore science in my own classroom on day!