Today was so much fun! Our class experienced our first day of field work. We worked in a sixth grade classroom at Sacred Heart. This is a private school so they all were wearing uniforms. The students were all well behaved for the most part. They are all very eager to learn and have alot of background information on rocks. When asked what they know about rocks, we received answers with great vocabulary words. It was a very small classroom but the groups made it work. The classroom consisted of nineteen students. Two of the students were autistic and one has an aid to help throughout the day. I am very excited to work with these students because they are all very smart. My group however has to re-plan our lesson because the school does not have internet.
Today was the last day of class before we start fieldwork! As a class we went over my group's lesson plan. Dr. S went over everything that we had to fix with the whole class. Thursday we will be in St. Joseph's School. We will be teaching sixth graders about rocks and minerals on Tuesday. Thursday we will be get to know our students. Our group is going to have the students write on cut outs information about themselves and what they know about the topic. Once they are done we will be making a poster look like a cave filled with rocks and minerals. We also presented our group slides to our classmates today. Everybody's presentations definitely improved. The class felt more confident with their presentations. There was less people saying "guys" throughout the presentations. Also the slides were more animated than the last presentations we did. This is great practice for when we actually go into the classroom to teach.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Today in class we presented our PowerPoint slides about student misconceptions as a group. This was very scary because I felt as I was not as prepared as I would have liked to be! Well I learned from this activity that as a teacher I have to be more prepared otherwise I will not be successful. This was a great learning experience because it taught me how to distribute the work that we all worked on as group equally. Next class we will be presenting even more slides. I feel as if my group will be much more prepared this time because we have more time and it is our second time presenting as a group so we know what to expect. We get the opportunity to fix what we messed up on last time. I think this is perfect practice for us for when we have to teach our sixth grade scientists during field work.
Today in class we learned about how to do our unit plan correctly. There are different elements that are required in order to make a proper unit plan. A unit plan consists of five lesson plans.A teacher's job is to teach the facts and concepts. The goal of teaching these are for your students to make generalizations. We also learned it is important to have our students use educational language such as "I inferred..". This increases student vocabulary.
It is also very important to do hands on activities and not just boring textbook lessons. Unit plans have different sections. The sections required throughout the unit plan are the overview and rationale, standards, central focus, objectives, subject matter outline, lesson plans, assessment methods, resources and reflections.
Today in class we learned about how to do our unit plan correctly. There are different elements that are required in order to make a proper unit plan. A unit plan consists of five lesson plans.A teacher's job is to teach the facts and concepts. The goal of teaching these are for your students to make generalizations. We also learned it is important to have our students use educational language such as "I inferred..". This increases student vocabulary.
It is also very important to do hands on activities and not just boring textbook lessons. Unit plans have different sections. The sections required throughout the unit plan are the overview and rationale, standards, central focus, objectives, subject matter outline, lesson plans, assessment methods, resources and reflections.
Today in science, we started out the class by trying to figure out what is in a bag Dr. Smiranova brought. I was very interested in what was in the bag. First we had to make educated guesses on what we thought was in the bag. I shook the bag when it was my turn to feel the bag. I also squeezed this and heard a squeak. This lead me to believe there is some type of toy in the bag. This is a great activity to do with students because it teaches them to make educated guesses based on what they infer. It also is a great way to practice making hypothesis and to show that they hypothesis isn't always correct. It also is a great way to show that not everything in science is exact. We also had to think of different scientific myths. One of my myths was thinking that something like Star Wars existed. Kids often think that just because something is on television that it is real. This is not the case though. I also wrote down about the desert being so hot that you would melt if you ever visited. Kids will think myths like these are true until they are shown otherwise.
