15 weeks ago

As this semester comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on my past experiences and how far I have come from 15 weeks ago. When I write 15 weeks I think how long that seems, but honestly that 15 weeks has come and gone faster then expected. I remember 15 weeks ago entering this classroom and not even being registered for it, but something stuck out to me and I wanted in. I called the registrar and they put me in Social Studies Methods, and it was the hardest and best decision I made all semester. As I reflect on the time I have spent in Social Studies Methods the first thing I think about is the letters we read at the beginning of the semester, the insight from the past students telling us how difficult this class was going to be, but how great Dr. Smirnova is and how everyone gets through it. Now I am one of those past students that can give some insight on the students that are going to enter Dr. Smirnova's class in the fall. I learned about so many different resources and engaging ways to teach social studies that I never would have thought about before. I learned how to time manage like I never thought I could because I had no other choice, which in college is a great accomplishment. I was able to teach a whole class and gain experience on how to create a unit plan and fun activities that students really enjoyed. I love the idea of an interactive social studies classroom in the future, especially for elementary students. Technology is the way of the world and students need to learn that they have access to everything on this earth at their finger tips. By teaching with technology it allows students to be engaged in a way that lets them learn in an interactive and engaging way. I have gained so much knowledge about teaching and the resources that are available to me that I have to thank Dr. Smirnova, for transferring her knowledge onto all of us. And allowing everyone in our class to grow and having the patients to deal with the dozens of emails at all hours of the day and night, you are truly an amazing educator and I thank you for your knowledge and guidance through this semester.

You're Hired!

So today was interview day, we all dressed in our best and everyone got into their fieldwork groups. As an administrator for the day I sat with my other administrator collages and we each stood up and introduced ourselves and gave background information on ourselves and the schools we were representing. I was an administrator at Happy Feet Elementary school where I was principle since 2008. After our introductions we started at one group and rotated around to each of the other 3 groups. I started with a warm up question about why each person wanted to become a teacher, and what there teaching philosophy was. With this warm up question we were able to see who might be the leader in the group and answer the question first. After the warm up question I asked each person a different question and enjoyed hearing how each person responded differently from each group. Some of the responses I got were similar to how I interpreted the question. One question I asked was along the lines of, independent practice is very important to a child's understanding of the direct instruction lesson, how would you approach a situation where the parents were overstepping the boundaries and doing the independent practice for them. The answer I agreed with most was along the lines of calling the parents and staying in contact with them so they understand that it is important for their children to succeed by doing the work themselves, by parents doing the work it enables the children to succeed and for us to evaluate them effectively. Also, as teacher we are able to see what a student understands themselves and what might be done for them at home. Once we had gone through each group the administrators had a meeting to decide who we would hire from the interview. It was unanimous that Susan and Julia would get the jobs. We appreciated their enthusiasm and their answers stuck out to each of us. Even though it was a mock interview we were able to tell that there answers came from the heart and what they truly believed. So congratulations Julia and Susan...

  

Get ready to be Interviewed !

So, in order to prepare for our future as teacher, and facing the scary interview process. Dr. Smirnova has required that each fieldwork group select a president. I am lucky enough to be one of them. Being  president requires that we come up with a story based on our lives or what we might hope to accomplish in the future, and four to five interview questions to ask the groups. The presidents are broken down into, direct lesson, inquiry, cooperative and social studies based. I will be asking questions based on the direct lesson plan format of teaching. In doing so I will see how my perspective teachers answer the questions I have come up with, how confident they are in the answers that they give, and if I believe they can be a suitable teacher in my elementary school. I personally think this is an awesome way to end the semester, rather then a final exam. I know I do better telling someone about what I know, rather than writing it all down. It gives us a chance to think about what questions we might be asked in the future and allows us to see how much we have really retained over the course of the semester. It also gives our classmates the opportunity to get a feel for what an interview is like but not having the pressure of an adult who is truly judging them on what is being asked of them. Even though I am a president during this session, I am at the same level as everyone else in my classroom. It is important to get as much real world experience as we can in college, this is the time to do so, once we are thrown into the real world; there is no getting this time back.

Here is the link to our google docs which provides the questions we will be asking the class.

It's your time to shine! Find your own Current Event !

Current events have always been something I did in school. It was a fun way to learn about what was going on in the world rather than reading the history books. I know for me, I like what is current. I enjoy learning about the NOW, because lets face it history repeats itself. So in my opinion, if we all learn about what is happening in the world around us today, it can save us a lot of trouble when the same situation happens years down the road.

When I graduate from college, I am going to be a young teacher. That has its advantages, and one of them is being able to enlighten my future  students with interesting activities to keep them engaged. Instead of learning history through a textbook why not learn history through current events. Of course there has to be a mix of both, but we can keep it at a happy medium. 

Ive learned that teaching current event articles, doesn't have to be the typical sitting and reading from a newspaper clipping or printed out news article. It can be about letting students search for themselves and find something that THEY find interesting. The use of current events can be used in many ways, of course you can provide your students with an article pertaining to what you're teaching, but you can make it fun. For example, as teachers we can place articles around our global map in our classroom, assign an article to each student and have them connect their news article to the place it occurred on the map with string and tape. Students will be able to see how news articles occur all over the globe. Or you can even incorporate different subject matter into your current even project. This idea comes from a website that was provided to us from Dr. Smirnova,"News Scavenger Hunts: Provide students with a list of things to find on the front page of today's newspaper. Students might hunt in the paper for math-related words and terms (a percent, a measurement of distance, a cost, an address, and a fraction) or grammar-related terms (a present-tense verb, a past-tense verb, a proper noun, an abbreviation, a colon, and a list separated by commas). Or students might scavenge the main sports page for a list of sports-related terms. Or you might let students work in small groups to hunt for as many nouns (or proper nouns, or verbs) as they can find in a story or on the front page. The group that finds the most is the winner!" By doing this in your classroom, you are allowing students to go further than social studies and allow them to see how each subject works within each other to teach. 

The current event I presented to my collages allowed students to search for themselves for different current events. I broke my class up into four groups, National, World, State, and Educational. Each group of students had to search for a current event that pertained to the list above. I thought this was such a great idea, instead of just reading an article you are given now the class had to do something they haven't been introduced to before. I got the idea from Dr. Smirnova and I quickly listened to the suggestions she had given me on how to go about this. I posted the assignment on our form and assigned the groups before hand so they would come to class Friday prepared to discuss the article they have chosen. However, I knew it would be difficult if my students did not prepare for the class ahead of time, so incase that happened we allowed some time IN class to prepare for the discussion (always have a backup plan). 

When it was time to present the current even project on friday I was eager to see what my classmates chose... but no one was prepared. I allowed them 5 minutes to get their articles together and quickly read what they were about. After we got the ball moving I was impressed with how everyone jumped in to participate. Everyone seemed to like the idea of finding their own article and they were able to learn what was happening, in the world, in the state, locally, and in education all within the same time period. The feedback we received from our classmates was great, and I enjoyed that they enjoyed the activity so much. 

In the form post, I suggested some websites that would be useful. Those websites were geared towards 6th graders, so I would do this same activity in my 6th grade classroom. But, if I were doing a current event activity in a first grade classroom I would use articles from children magazines, like TIMES. I would separate the class into groups and give them different articles just like 6th grade, the first graders would still discuss the same questions and find their own opinions about the articles but it is done in an appropriate way for a first grade class. By using the TIMES magazines, it also provides students with questions that they need to focus on in the article, it helps them to follow directions and read to find the answer to questions. 

In my classroom I think I will try to do current events every week. I will try to allow my students to use any source they choose as long as it is something to do with education or the world around us. Facebook has become huge for sharing articles and interesting topics, if they find something on Facebook I want them to know that it is something happening in the world and can be used as a current event. Instead of holding my students back from the technology sources they have access to, it is important for them to know how to use them in the correct way and for useful things. The difference between having the freedom in a 6th grade classroom as opposed to a 1st grade classroom, is that 6th graders are able to distinguish the difference between what is a legitimate news article, and what might be a fake story. So, 1st graders have to be more monitored when it comes to searching news articles on the web. I personally would prefer to stick to paper articles for 1st graders because I know it is the raw current event news that first graders can understand.

Current events can be taught in all different age groups, it is a fun way to teach social studies and make sure that your students are well aware of what is going on within the world around them. If we teach them to be informed early on in their lives, they are more likely to stay informed. It is important for children to understand and be aware of their world because they are going to be running it one day! 

BizMovie !

I know as a future teacher I am always thinking of ways to keep students interested in topics that I am going to be teaching. I know for me growing up I loved the different projects we would do in class and the group work that would take up a few class days. Then at the end seeing the finished product that we all worked so hard to put together. Over a few class sessions my group and I worked hard to understand Bizmovie! A interactive way to teach students economics in the classroom, while getting real life experience. Going into this I had no idea what BizMovie even was. Dr. Smrinova handed us a booklet on it and my group and I looked at it with such confusion. But, after reading about it and researching it online we quickly started to understand what it was all about. BizMovie is an interactive student based project that allows students to create their own production company. My group and I put together a video debate using Go-Animate-4 Schools, we created the video but found out we could not save it longer then 30 seconds. We were able to put together the full seven minute video but we were not able to save it. So for our project we decided to make three 30 second videos.

This is the introduction to the debaters, one will debating for lectures in the classroom while the women is debating for Bizmovie in the classroom. 

This is a clip of the debaters starting to discuss the differences between biz movie and lectures in the classroom 

This is the narrator sharing with everyone how much he loves biz movie and how it can be utilized successfully in the classroom.

It was disappointing not being able to put together the whole go-animate movie, since it seemed like a really awesome website to use. I wish it could have been used for a trial for a certain amount of time instead of just having to buy it. Teachers try to utilize all the resources they can at any point, So i wish i could have shown my class the finished product, so they might want to use it in the future as well. 

lets learn about economics

I haven't learned about economics since i was a senior in high school, which was about three years ago. So, it was nice to get a little review on economics and my fellow classmates gave me some great ideas on how to teach economics in the classroom for younger children. We each were assigned a question that we had to do research into. So, some of my classmates showed us some websites to use in the classroom, while other classmates taught us ways to teach younger students how to budget and manage money starting at a young age. I think it is so important to teach students to manage money and what the value of a dollar really is because they are our future. They are the future business leaders in our country and one day they will be taking over, we want them to have something to take over and we want them to all be successful. My favorite way to teach economics had to have been the interactive ways using the computer. They were able to compare and contrast different pizza places and who offered what and who had the best prices to see which better pizza they could get for the value of their money. I thought students would love something like that. I taught the difference between micro and macro economics, which was hard to relate to younger students. But, I would possibly have students learn the differences and then create their own collage with the differences between the 2. Again, I think it is so important to teach students about economics and our economy because it controls everything about their future. Students that are more aware of the economic situation in our country are able to be more insightful and more successful in their future endeavors.  

The difference between MICRO and MACRO Economics.

This week in class we started to work on how to teach economics to our future students. We each got a question to research within the chapter in the text book. I chose the question, what is the difference between micro and macro economics. I chose this question because I learned about economics my senior year of high school and i really enjoyed learning about micro and macro economics. The difference between the two is typed below. 

Microeconomics is the study of individual households, companies, and markets and how resources and prices combine to distribute wealth and products. It is based on what the price of something is now in order to figure out what the demand of the product is. The government regulates these businesses that monopolize the economics. Whereas Macroeconomics is the study of the big picture of the economy as a whole. it provides an overview of the conditions in an entire nation. It is based on the Gross national product (GNP) which is the value of all the goods and services produced in a nation in a year. unlike being regulated by the government this is regulated by person. 

Below, is a video i found on youtube that explains micro and macro economics using images as well as words, so it is easier to understand.