Kiera's Journey to Teaching Social Studies to New Generation Learners

Yesterday one of my fellow classmates went to a mock job interview and here are some questions he said he was asked and what they are looking for.... What sets you apart from other candidates - really sell yourself, more skills, give more specific examples, Bring a portfolio of things you wrote, successful lesson plans. You can also say you can start something new, a club or work with the sports teams, not just working with lessons etc. Also bringing in the community to the classroom and working with the community. How would you differentiate assessment Classroom management: your teaching a lesson and everyone is engaged but Johnny is in the back sabotaging the lesson, what would you do? How would you incorporate technology in the lesson? - use a chrome book to explore, be a model. not just a  stand alone lesson What do you need to know about your students? - as much as possible is ideal, not their trivial things, their family situations How do you compensate for childre...

Reflecting on my Teaching Experience I wanted to take a moment and say I had the opportunity to teach alongside some wonderful future teachers. My fellow classmates and I worked great with one another. We all cooperated very well with one another. While creating our lesson plans we all pitched ideas and we were able to come up with one unanimous decision on what we would do. When it came to doing all the work for the lessons such as creating the powerpoint, independent practices, writing the lesson plans we all shared the work and held our own, nobody did more work than someone else. It was very different compared to my teaching experience from last semester. However, while teaching this semester I felt my teachers and I had very good control over the class, we held them to the same expectations that the teacher would hold them to. We never ran out of time while conducting our lessons, we have been the only group to conduct all 3 of our lessons start to finish including al...

A Trip to the Bank Pt. 3 Today my fellow teachers and I conducted our final lesson to the second graders. This lesson was a cooperative lesson instruction. We started the lesson off by reviewing the classroom rules again. During this time we told the class that we he held the sam expectations that their teacher has for them. While saying this the class gives us respect which is what we teachers always want. After this brief encounter we conducted a quick review of the material our previous lessons have been on. The teachers went over what it means to work in a group and then specific roles that will take place in the groups. The roles were.. leader, time keeper, helper and project manager. After this time, we broke the class into preassigned groups where each group conducted different activities. We strategically assigned what students were in which group after having some students who cause more issues together during our inquiry lesson we didn't want a repeat today. The acti...

A Trip to the Bank Pt. 2 Two days after my group conducted their direct instruction lesson we did an inquiry style lesson plan. This lesson is more student centered. During this lesson we continued our story line of Spongebob and Patrick, However, Plankton was the star of the show this lesson. During this lesson we broke the class up into 3 groups. I believe having each group not rotate and just focus on their station is really good. From watching the 2 other groups before us and for their inquiry lesson and they all had stations and rotated this took a lot of time. However with our lesson we stayed with just our group and went into depth with the topic. Each group had the same 2 articles that they focused on. From there they explored the articles and figured out ways that they would help plankton out! After group time, we had the class share their findings from the article to the rest of the class. Following that, the class worked independently to report their findings to Plankton...

A Trip to The Bank Pt. 1 Today I had the opportunity to teach a direct lesson instruction to Bishop Dunn's second grade classroom. The topic of my instruction was "A Trip to the Bank." Throughout this lesson we discussed the terms associated with the bank. For instance, we explained what saving and spending are and how they are different. We also explained what a deposit and withdrawal are and when you need to go about those actions. We gave the definitions of loan, taxes and interest. We conducted check for understandings after every 2 slides, which ended up being about after every 4 terms. These brain breaks are used for us teachers to be able to assess the kid's knowledge on the information we just gave them. After our last brain break we did two different guided practices with the kids. The kids really seemed to enjoy the matching. Although we made some mistakes while conducting the guided practices the point still got across to them. After our guided practices ...

First Visit at Bishop Dunn! Today we went into Bishop Dunn and met with the second grade class we are going to be doing fieldwork in. The class is made up of 13 kids! Overall the class seemed very energetic and super excited to work with us! While working with he class we conducted our ice breaker activities. My group's ice breaker activity involved rolling dice and answering questions. The kids seemed to enjoy this activity, Luckily another one of my classmates in my group had these question sheets written out from another method's class so not much planning was involved in this. The kids are eager to start to learn and i'm excited to start to be in the field with them!