Celebration of Learning

As a teacher you should try to celebrate when your students accomplish a hard or long task.  By celebrating the students and their learning you teach the students that the work they do is important.  As a group the teacher-candidates put together a post-test assessment.  After the students took the post-assessment we started the fun.  First, we created a Kahoot! for the students to do.  This helped us not only have a fun time, but it always help us assess the information the students could recall. The students love playing Kahoot!  It becomes a friendly competition between the students.  When we were done with the Kahoot! games the students were asked to pick some of their favorite topics we had learned about over the past three week.  As we talked as a group about the past three weeks students stated they liked creating the ThingLinks and the Glogster.  Then, the students created a google slide to thank the teacher-candidates.  At the end of the session, the teaching-candidates presented the amazing students of Bishop Dunn certificates of learning and presented Mrs. Perk with a year subscription to Glogster.  Looking back on this experiences has made me feel like I can handle more situations within a classroom.  Being thrown into a situations, teaching on my feet, and learning from others are three of the things I will take away from my fieldwork this year. 

The Last Step Back In Time: Ancient Rome

Here we are at our last stop on our road back in time.  Erica and Kristine used a great technique for note taking.  On the slides there will be a star by any information that the students need to copy down on their graphic organizer.  The direct lesson covered the government, Julius Caesar, architecture, and gladiator.  After the direct lesson, the students got a short break before moving onto the inquiry lesson.  In the inquiry lesson the teacher-candidates used a bar code scanning program.  The students use Ipads to scan codes and match the correct information.  This was a great task for the students because it allowed the students to get up and move around the room while doing their work.  For the cooperative learning lessons the teacher-candidates used the same tool that my group did.  They used ThingLink for their students group work.  The students worked in groups to create a ThingLink on a topic given to them by the teacher-candidates.  The one thing I realized from their session was to not have to many different graphic organizers for the students to use during the direct lesson.  Having only one graphic organizer helps keep the students focused and organized. 

The Next Step Back In Time: Ancient Greece

Today we took our second step back in time.  We visited Ancient Greece.  Rachel and Rebecca used a great focus statement.  The statement is when the teacher-candidates say "Macaroni and cheese" the students reply with "Everyone freeze".  This was a focus statement that I haven't heard before and the students really liked it.  In the direct lesson for Ancient Greece the teacher-candidates taught a group of vocabulary words.  Some of the words were: continent, polytheism, mono theism, and democracy.  The teacher-candidates then gave the students a short break before they moved into the inquiry lesson.  Their inquiry lesson was to research different mythological gods of Ancient Greece.  The students were given clues and they need to use the inquiry process to match the clues they had, to the god that went with the clues.  This was a fun activity for the students and the students seemed to like it a lot.  For the teacher-candidates cooperative learning lesson they used the gods from the inquiry lesson to create a glogster as a group.  The students were broken into groups by the god they received in the inquiry lesson.  The groups worked together to create a digital posters using the webpage gloster.  This was a new tool for the students.  It was a great project for them and they truly enjoyed it.  The one thing I realized from their session is to always check your technology before you start your lesson.