One more week!

Well folks we only have one more week of practicum experience left before entering a school full time. I hope everyone has had as much fun as I have had working with the students. Sometimes the faculty we work with or for are worse than the students with behavior intervention plans but that's part of the gig as well. I wish all of you a very successful career in education. It has truly been a pleasure working with each of you and I am sure that your classroom will be the envy of your school. Rock on NKU Class of 2007!

Almost finished!

I had a unique experience for the first time while in a practicum location. I was observing how my CT was talking firmly to one of the boys in our class. The boy was just standing beside her with his head done and not making any eye contact. After she had been talking to him for a long time my CT finally looked up at me and asked if I could walk him down to the office. I said sure and took the form from her. Well the boy raced across the room and I thought this wouldn't take much of my time, well was I wrong! As soon as we reached the hallway, he froze on me. My teacher said I would probably have to take him by the arm and convince him to go well had to do just that to get him only half way down the hallway. Long story short I had to go down to the office to get the Principal to come and get him. The Principal had no idea who I even was (and I sat in on an IEP meeting with him before) so I had to tell him who I was. After that he was joking around with me, "welcome to education", "I will get his head you can get his feet" (he was just kidding with this as well). I must say I never had experienced anything like this before, not even when I use to sub. I just fell bad for the boy because this was totally not like him at all!

scientific revolution

I really enjoyed the class on scientific revolution. I am a better learner when i can do things hands-on. I think students would enjoy doing a lesson using anyone of these experiments. It takes time, group effort, and hands-on to complete each of the experiments. This is a great way to get students envolved and working in a group to complete something.

social studies unit complete :)

Erica and I finished up teaching our social studies unit today and it went pretty well. Our topic was kentucky history. The first day, we had the students work in groups of 4-5 for the assessment part. They had a large piece of white paper and they had to draw the state of kentucky. Labeling its capitol, two other cities, state bird, fish and wild animal. The kids seemed to have a good time with this, but they did not seem to work well in groups. There was a lot of arguing and dispute- and this took up thier time quickly. We gave them about 30 min to complete this. The time it took them to actually complete it, and the time we allowed, were way off. They needed almost an hour- just for the group work. Good thing is, our teacher is awesome and she let us have some extra time after recess to let them finish up. This made me wonder if they were not used to doing projects like this in the classroom with our cooperating teacher. Not sure~ They looked great completed, but Erica and I decided that with the group chaos, our next assessment was going to be individual. So, today, we had the kids make up thier own state, making similarities and differences to kentucky. They could call it whatever they wanted, draw it however they wanted, and so on. We gave them a rubric with the blank piece of paper for thier state and this seemed to help. The kids got really creative with this one. Overall, I think they got a lot out of it and they had a great time. SUCCESS!!! :)

Its finally over!!!! :)

So I taught my Social Studies lessons this week and they went really well. My first lesson was on interdependence and we discussed the milk process and how it was related to interdependence. While reading my book that went along with my lesson the words nipple and teet came up. Of course the students found these words to be extremely funny and laughed out loud when I read them. One student asked what a teet was and I had to explain to him so as not to cause a disrupption with the other students. Several time through out the story the word came up and thankfully I could ommit it and no one knew the difference. It was definitely interesting to say the least and if I were able to have read the story before hand I might have been better prepared for the students reactions. Todays lesson went really well and I was very pleased with how the students did and how well they paid attention and participated in my activities. Overall everything went really well but I am relieved that is is all over :)

Scientific Revolution

The most important component of the Scientific revolution lesson was the integration of science and social studies. With the lack of time in the day too many schools cut out on one or the other, I see this in my practicum classroom. It is very rare that the teacher has enough time for both subjects but she does try to integrate as in this lesson as much as possible. The hands on experiements provided an engaging learning opportunity to truly learn rather than listening to the teacher's discussion or blindly reading from a text. And i will say it, some of the experiements were "FUN". Hands on materials are a motivator for students to actively participate and when students are active they are learning. I also like working in groups, working in groups is a social learning experience and this strategy should be used in the classroom whether the students are in first grade or 11th. In addition to working in groups, i like how the groups were randomly selected by the colored erasers, by using this method throughout the school year students will get acquainted with all of their classmates instead of the select few they are friends with, this also eliminates the teacher from placing the weaker students with the stronger which is benefecial but not good to do all of the time.

Scientific Revolution

I really enjoyed the scientific revolution activity day in class. The lesson was set up in a great way to show us how we can incorporate science and social studies together. The activities were very engaging and hands-on, which students will love. One way that I could incorporate this science lesson with social studies is to have the students research the history behind each of the experiments we did in class. They could find out who tried those experiments first and how they recorded their findings. I think it would be a great way to teach students that many of the ideas we have today about the way things are stem from ideas people in history had. It is also a great way to show why recording data is important. If you want other people to hear your ideas and improve it is some way, it needs to be written down for them to see. I also think that you can study the origins of certain scientific ideas and have students study the cultures of those scientists. Overall, I see how easily science and social studies concepts can be interwoven in lessons.