SALE week!

I don't know about you guys, but Sale week went wonderful for our group. We were blessed to have such a great group of second graders who came in every day eager to learn. It was such a great experience and I took away so much from working with that group for the short 4 days we had. I learned that to teach such young children, you have to get on their level. You have to put yourself in their shoes so you can understand how and what they are thinking. It was really important that we were very friendly with them too. We had to get stern a couple of times and exert some harder classroom management skills, but all in all I think the students respected us and followed our rules and directions very well. I was worried at first about incorporating all of the subjects into our lessons, but as we went on it became easier and easier; especially Social Studies. We were able to incorporate geography, money, government, presidents, and maps into our lessons to teach them in the social studies area. They enjoyed it thoroughly and I think they learned a lot and will remember it for the rest of their lives; as will we.

Block Experience

Hi everyone! I thought I would do my next blog on my experience so far at Caledonia Elementary School. It has been wonderful! I absolutely love the school, my mentor teacher, the principal, and the class! I hope to one day get a job here :) When the students arrive in the morning, they know immediately to look at the board to see their morning work criteria (sometimes it will be graded, sometimes it won't). They do morning work until the announcements, then they begin their reading from 7:50-9, English 9-10:10, Snack 10:10-10:30, Activity class (Aft, computer, P.E., and Music) 10:30-11, math 11-12:30, Lunch 12:30-1, Recess 1-1:20, Social Studies 1:20-2, AR/ AM (accelerated math and accelerated reading)2-2:45, And they dismiss at 2:55. My mentor teacher has wonderful classroom management skills and has great classroom organization. I have learned so much from being here and it is only day 4! I also have jump started on my unit and have already figured out when I am doing my 2 prior lessons. I hope all of your experiences are going as well as mine is! (:

Social Studies for Kids

While I was doing a little digging on what I could do for my next blog post, I came across this website www.socialstudiesforkids.com. It is a wonderful website for elementary social studies teachers who need to find a variety of information on the units they are teaching. This website has many different topics to choose from including: current events, fun and games, book reviews, cultures, holidays, language, religion, economics, geography, maps, government, U.S. presidents, timelines, states, wars, archaeology, sports, and even links to other resources for teachers to use. This would be a wonderful website for us to use during Sale Week and I hope you all find it as useful as I did.
http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/

HAWAIIIIIIIIII

Our group is doing our lesson on the state of Hawaii. When we talk about our lessons that we created, I was afraid we might leave some interesting ideas out. I found this website (which I really want Lisa and Katie to pay close attention to), but it is for all of us. It is a fun little website, which would be perfect for students to get on to do some research with. It has the basic info about Hawaii's people, fun facts, the land, and creatures that can be found in Hawaii. There is even a tab for parents and educators. We will all more than likely do a lesson about Hawaii, at some point in our teaching career, so save this website to your favorites...I did. :)http://www.hawaiikids.net/kids/hawaii_factsnfun.html

A Teacher's Prayer

http://pinterest.com/pin/200480620883559224/
I thought this was a very sweet quote that all teachers should keep in mind. Happy blogging :)

My Vacation

I though I would share with you all a Social Studies activity that I had to do when I was in the sixth grade. I can't remember exactly what the teacher called it, but I will call it "My Vacation". We were told we were going to do a "research project" on a vacation spot of our choice. The teacher had a list of different national landmarks, and popular vacation spots for us to choose from, and we all had to have a different one. We were told to research the spot and present information about it to our class. We had one week to complete it. We never worked on it in class, we had to come up with our own resources, and if we had questions about it, we had to ask the teacher in between classes. Looking back on this research project, I think it had great potential. At the time, it was a hassel for me and my classmates due to the lack of resources and the confusion it accumulated. However, in today's world, I think this would not even be considered a "research project" to students, it would be to them more of a fun activity. Doing this would be a great way for students to learn about other cultures. We could provide students with a rubric of what we expect from them and allow them time to work on it in their centers. There are so many resources students can easily access today, as well. When I was doing this project, I did not have a computer at home, and we couldn't use the ones in the library for anything but our AR tests, so I had to rely mainly on books I rented from the city library. I also bought an Atlas, and contacted family I had that lived near the location I chose. But today, the only thing that seperates students from the world are our fingertips. If we have students participate in activities like this that they actually enjoy, we will be promoting more learning this way rather than have them sit down and take notes off of a power point that the teacher put together.

A Game for Learning the Capitals of the United States of America

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/states_capitals_10_500.html

I found this website off of google and it is a wonderful resource for learning the state's capitals. I played around with it for a while and was surprised at my lack of remembrance of what some of the capitals are! Yall should definitely go check this game out. When I have my classroom and hopefully have an Ipad or computer section, my students will definitely be playing this game in that center. What it is is a picture of the United States of America. At the top it will say, for example, pick the state whose capital is Montgomery. Then you would click on Alabama and the state would turn red. If you get it wrong, it tells you the answer and it will come back to it later. So not only is this helping them learn their state capitals, it is reinforcing their knowledge of the states' locations.