ED4ALL Conference

What is better than spending your saturday morning at the ED4ALL conference?! NOTHING! Today I spent my morning at the mount for the ED4ALL conference put on by KDP. Being honest, I was dreading it. I was not looking forward to sitting for 6 hours at a conference, but I am so glad I did because it had an awesome turn out and I enjoyed it very much. When you first arrived you had the opportunity to get some breakfast and coffee and find your seat. Then we all played a getting to know you BINGO which was really fun and engaging. Then the conference started out with a key note speaker who did an awesome job talking to us about technology. I learned so much through this key note speaker and she was very informative. Then we took a little break and  moved split up into the sessions we signed up for. I got there late, so I was placed in a double session learning about thinglink. At first, I was a little disappointed I was put into a double sessions, as I was dreading how slow the time would go by. But now as I am reflecting, I am so glad I was placed into this group. What an incredible experience it was. Words cannot explain how much I was impressed by what we were introduced to, and ways we can implement thing link into the classroom to make lessons interactive and engaging for the students. We learned about a 3D lesson using thing link. You are able to choose any picture and explore it on a laptop or phone, and make a full lesson out of it including pre-assessments, facts, vocabulary, assessments, etc. This was an incredible experience that I highly recommend to anyone, and I am so glad I went and experienced all of these wonderful, inspiring key note speakers.

Artifact Bag Project

Our class was instructed to create an artifact bag to present in class to our groups. An artifact bag is a mystery bag of items (artifacts) which student examine using their senses, analyze, and come to a conclusion about. It is common for students to be required to fill out a chart about the who, what, where, when , and why of each artifact during their examination to help them analyze the items.

My artifact bag related to the topic of my fieldwork lessons which was "The Battle That Changed History." My artifacts included a picture of where the battle took place (senlac hill), a picture of the normans and anglo-saxons battling each other, a crown, and a bow and arrow. These items all relate to the battle of hastings so the students after examining and analyzing them would come to the conclusion that all of these artifacts help understand how the battle changed history. Our class split into groups and we each presented our artifact bag project. As I was presenting, I had a google slides presentation up on the computer to guide me through the lesson. If I was teaching this in real life to a class, I would have the google slides follow through my teaching of this activity for a fifth grade class.

If I was going to actually teach this lesson, it would be taught through the inquiry process. The lesson would

begin with a review of the vocabulary words and then continue by going over the definition of an artifact if the students do not have background knowledge of the word. The scientific method would be reviewed, as in all Inquiry lessons. Then I would explain the chart that the students would be filling out. After all of the explanation is finished I will distribute the artifact bags and the students would begin their examination process. When the students have analyzed the items in their bags and completed their charts to come to a conclusion, they would be given the opportunity to present their findings. Each group would present their bags and their conclusion to the class.

Artifact bags are a great way to have students working hands on with manipulatives and discovering Social Studies ideas on their own with guidance from the teacher.
I will definitely utilize them in my own classroom when teaching Social Studies!

All Done Teaching Already, Now What?!

Now that we are all done with teaching, it is time to buckle up on assignments! I will miss going into the classroom and teaching those sweet fourth graders, and observing my peers teach. It was so interesting and a great learning experience to see what everyone did throughout their lessons (and a lot more fun than being in the classroom!!). But, now it is time to learn how to implement social studies into the classroom and learn about different aspects of social studies to teach. This is also very exciting as it involved educating future students and learning new, effective ways to do so. I am excited to create my artifact bag project and learn about different tribes and teach them to the class. This is what is coming up next, and I am excited to find new ways to teach social studies and reflect on these experiences!

Boys and Girls Club

This semester, I got a job at the boys and girls club in Newburgh as a first grade teacher. This is an amazing learning experience, but really challenges me as I am a full time student, and now working a full time job. I feel extremely overwhelmed trying to focus on school, but also the needs of my students and be there for them as they highly look up to me. As hard as it has been to balance out school work and teaching a first grade class for three hours, this has been an incredible experience and the best I think I could personally get. I am beginning to learn that there are truly going to be good and bad days, and this just means that the bad days teach you what you can do differently next time and this will definitely help you grow as an educator. Only having my students for a couple of months, I have created such an incredible bond with them and I want nothing more but to see them succeed to their fullest potential, and I am doing everything in my power to make sure of this. I think it is super important to leave a great positive impression on your students and that is exactly what I am aim for. This job has truly made my passion and ambition for teaching grow even more and I cannot wait to have my own classroom one day.

Being an elementary teacher is something I have dreamed about my whole life. I have always aspired to be a teacher since I was younger and would use my textbooks and school work to teach my American girl dolls on the chalkboard. As a student studying elementary education, all of the fieldwork I have experienced like observing elementary classrooms and getting the opportunity to teach lessons in a classroom has taught me so much and gave me incredible insights of what it's like to be in a real classroom teaching. This has made me so excited to begin student teaching and eventually start my career as a teacher. I can’t wait to shape students minds, create innovative ways for them to learn, and help them grow to their fullest potential.

Midterm Week!

I cannot believe we are already half way through the semester and finishing up midterms. This past weekend, I completed the midterm for our social studies methods class. It took me a long time to complete, especially since I had to dig through the textbook, but it was all very effective and useful information. I was very glad we got to have as many attempts we we wanted too in order to get all the information correct and get a good grade. Our teacher truly wants us to know the information, and was not just giving this midterm to trick us or stress us out, which is very appreciative. 
Before the midterm, we also had to complete part 1 of edTPA. This went a lot smoother than last semester and was easier for me now that I have experience doing it, whereas last year I had none! The only thing that remained difficult was not having enough of the information about the school or the students that we needed to complete it, so it got frustrating at times. I am really glad we did get a chance to practice with it and go through the process of edTPA to start preparing us for student teaching. It is a very important task for us that we all need to know and be familiar with, considering we will be doing all of the parts for student teaching and they have to be accurate.

Engaging Students in Examining History

Today in class, Dr. Smirnova went over a powerpoint with us about learning to teach history. The powerpoint started with 3 paintings that represent different types of freedom. We were asked to identify the freedoms these paintings meant. These paintings were created by Norman Rockwell who became famous during the second world war and $132 million was raised from these paintings for the war effort. This was really interesting to learn about and I had never even heard of Norman Rockwell. You really do learn something everyday! We then learned that in order to teach a social studies lesson, there are powerful elements that are essential. These include the lesson being meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. We went over the importantce of each of these elements and talked about what they meant. We also talked about the structure of knowledge used to teach these lessons. After that, we went on to learning about what history means to us and what we think is the definition. I always remembered history as events that happened in the past and artifacts dug up from the past. This was right, but there was a lot more too it. "History is a chronolgical study that interprets and gives meaning to events and applies systematic methods to discover the truth in the storyline of history". We also discussed the importance of the difference between teaching your students, and making sure they learned and retained the information you taught to them. The last thing we learned about was what it meant to be a historian, which led us to being detectives and find out who the person is based on artifacts given to us in the artifact bags.

Our group was handed an artifact bag containing a birth certificate, a Russian jewelry box, an American flag pin, and a picture of an elder lady. The birth certificate was written in Russian so it was hard to figure out what it said. Our group actually thought it was the elder lady's passport, and she was coming to the United States which is why there was an American flag pin in our bag. We later found out that it was actually Dr. Smirnovas birth certificate and the picture was her grandmother who was really special to her. The American flag pin was inside the Russian jewelry box so Dr. Smirnova would always have a piece of Russia with her and to tell us that she keeps both cultures. The American flag pin was gifted to her when she first started teaching at the mount, which is really special to her. This was a challenging, but meaningful artifact and our group had a lot of fun figuring out what was in our bag. Next class, we will be creating our own artifact bags based on our topic we taught for fieldwork, and then teaching other fieldwork groups a mini lesson on our findings. I am excited to see and figure out what everyone will put in their artifact bags!

Second Day of Teaching

Our next lesson was our inquiry and direct lesson. Our group decided to do things a little differently and use a different type of inquiry that we have never used before. First, we started with a review of key points from the direct instruction lesson and pre-assessed the students with a word cloud. Then we moved on to our reenactment of the battle of hastings. This was our inquiry method. There was no problem for this method, but you still had to of course follow the steps of inquiry which was tricky. This method of inquiry also involved questioning throughout the lesson, which we did by asking questions and predictions about what might happen next during the reenactment. For the reenactment of the battle, we split the class up into two sides: the normans and the anglo-saxons. Harman was the king for the anglo-saxons, and lead her side, and I was the King William for the normans, and lead my side. The students had fun reenacting the battle and pretending they were a part of it, and it gave them great visual insights on the tactics used by both sides and the weapons. This was a very engaging lesson for the students, and they got a chance to reflect on their expoernece conducting an interview with the opposing side to implement cooperative learning. We should have made the groups bigger as cooperative learning should be in group of more than 3, but we got mixed up a little. It still went smoothly and the students enjoyed finding out different perspectives of both sides and coming up with conclusions about what they would change, or what they would do the same.