Cassandra's Journey through Social Studies

This week my group and I wrapped up our final day of teaching! We spent all weekend preparing for our cooperative learning lesson, and we were feeling really confident . We decided to split the class into 4 groups and each group had a different task to complete. One group had to write a skit while the other 3 groups had to use apps on the iPads to create an animated character based on the person they were assigned. The students really enjoyed completing these activities and really got into the jobs we assigned them within their groups. The group I worked with collaborated very well together and were very excited to share their completed project with their peers. At the end of the lesson I felt very relieved that it was over. I also left feeling like I gained a lot of knowledge about teaching from this experience. One of the main things I learned was to not over plan because you'll end up overwhelming they students, and make sure that you check with all the students that they under...

This week was all about lesson planning and teaching my first full class. Leading up to Tuesday, my group and I were busying planning for our direct instruction lesson. Although I was very nervous, I was also extremely excited. I walked into the classroom super nervous, but once I started talking it seemed so easy to me. All the nerves went away! I thought our first lesson went well, although we could have done more to get the students engaged, they did really enjoy the matching game with the white boards. I left the day feeling good and ready to plan our inquiry lesson for Thursday. For Thursday we did a QR code game and we planned out 6 stations for the students to rotate through. My group and I spent hours and hours preparing and and finalizing our lesson and activity, and we were feeling very confident and not nervous like last time. Thursday we played a game with the students called "Teacher vs. Class" where the students had to be on their best behavior in order to ge...

This week has been nothing short of stressful . My group and I have been working on our lesson plan for our lesson next week and we are doing very well, but it is very very stressful. Making the powerpoint isn't so bad, but coming up with activities for our inquiry and cooperative learning lesson is getting difficult. I'm happy now that Dr. Smirnova extended our teaching to 3 days. It allows us to plan more activities where we don't have to rush and overwhelm the students, as well as us. I'm very excited to teach next week, but I know the morning of I'm going to be so nervous I'll probably end up crying. Hopefully next week I'll be writing about how well the lesson went! But besides this class I have an English midterm the same day I have to teach so that is adding to my stress, but I'm trying to take it one day at a time. I know this is all a learning process and I'll learn ways to make lesson planning easier. 

This week involved watching the first group present their lesson plant the 5th graders. I was excited about this because it would give me ideas on what my group and I can do for our lesson. I thought this first group did a great job and set a good example for the rest of the class, and the 5th graders really seemed to enjoy it!  The one thing I really liked was the story they told in their cooperative learning lesson. The students seemed to be really engaged and enjoyed doing the activity to help Columbus find the latitude and longitude lines. I started to plan my lesson and at first I thought it was going to be hard, but as I started preparing the ideas just kept coming to me and it is actually really fun to do so far. My group and I would like to complete our first lesson by the middle of next week so we can get feedback from Dr. Smirnova with time to fix things before we present. Although I find it overwhelming I know things will get easier as I learn how to be a better teac...