Welcome to Week 6

I hope everyone is having a good week.

The days are flying by so fast. I can hardly keep up with the time. I know September the 1st must have been yesterday.

For this week, I have been working on the water project, science fair project, various discussion boards, and the list goes on. My proudest moment this week is working on the completion of my LE1. Though I am not completely done with it, I have been able to experience and write out my lesson plan presentations. At least now I have something down on paper which can be corrected. Thank you to Dr. Clark for the awesome formative feedback. I do appreciate your patient guidance into the edTPA lesson planning. Thank you to Dr. Parker who introduced edTPA in social studies. I am so glad to have been able to practice the edTPA a semester ahead of time. I am actually scheduled to do my presentations next week so that will be an awesome thing to get completed. Next week I will be in the classroom, probably every single day. The lesson plans for which I am teaching is based on a book called the “Alphabet Mystery.” I think this story should engage students because of its interesting setting. By this time in first grade, students have learned their letters, but now they have to connect the sounds with the letters. The story is about the alphabet letters set off on a search to find their friend little x. He has escaped because he does not think he is a useful part of the alphabet. Only until the end of the book does he realize his importance. X is the only letter who can be used as kisses. The Rutherford County curriculum incorporates searching for context clues, text clues, adjectives, commas, and reading comprehension skills into these five lessons.

For struggling this week, I have been trying to determine how my ecocolumn was a complete failure. My poor fish died last week. I think my crickets died several days ago because I have not observed any activity. The only thing which seemed to survive was my snail. All of the plants I dug up were dead as well. I decided on a few things I would change if I did this experiment again. I would have the ecocolumn in a sunlight area instead of on top of a cabinet. I would also have used seeds instead of digging them up out of the yard. Such different lengths of weeds were harder to measure.  I would have liked to have seen more results such as seeds sprouting. I will definitely keep this in mind when I have my own class. This would be a great project to do for incorporating science within the lesson. Students would take factual and conceptual learning to the next steps. After the initial project, it would only take a few minutes every day to collect the data.

The learning experience which gave me the most satisfaction was watching, the “Beginning Classroom Management" for EDU 435. The teacher demonstrated through her successful first day of class how much she had planned for correct transitions for students. Her goals were to establish routines with the children right when they walked through the classroom. Students knew they were supposed to go their desk as soon as they walked through the front door, deposit their stuff in the desk, and hang their book back on their desk chair. For lining up students, the teacher had smallest to largest. I also liked her game which I would like to incorporate into the class. The students all sit on the floor. Students give their name and then they think of what animal they would like to be. Very importantly, the teacher models this action first. Students follow her example. After students have exchanged names and animals which they would want to be, they draw pictures of their animals. I think this is a great activity to do in class for the first day of school, especially for all grade levels. The teacher and the students both learn each others name. Also, the teacher can develop a good foundation of what the students are like.

I am excited about my action steps for next week. I am out of town this week so I am looking forward to getting back to the classroom next week. Of course, as I mentioned earlier I will be teaching my edTPA lesson format next week. I will also be going on a field trip to Strawberry Hill. The children are so excited. They will be going on a hayride. I will also continue to work on my upcoming projects PLN, science unit, and my own Classroom Management Plan.

For my contributions to class this week, I have been working on developing a slideshow for the Science Fair Project. I want to have the content as neat as possible while also showing off a hyperdoc presentation. Oh, by the way, Dr. Parker, you said I would love hyperdocs. You are right. Hyperdocs are awesome. The whole lesson is right there on the slideshow or google docs. I am also working on the technology slideshow for hyperdocs chapter 8 by incorporating images and websites onto the slideshow. For next week, I will continue to work on the same slide shows to further completion in the final product.

For the outside research, I had the opportunity to visit John Adams (the 2nd president) house in Massachusetts. John Adams was a crucial man who is considered one of the founding fathers of our country. He was the son of a shoemaker and farmer of the outside city of Boston. He grew up to become an outspoken, honest lawyer. When the British began to impose harsh restrictions on the people of Massachusetts due to the Boston Tea Party, Adams supported the Independence from Great Britten. He worked hard for American Independence going as a diplomat to France in hopes to ask their support for America. He then was an ambassador for America to England. He became Vice President under President George Washington and then served as our 2nd president. He and his family have a fascinating history which I would encourage you to research. Apart from being a lover of books, I love American History. I have taken several pictures which I plan to incorporate into my classroom lesson plan. This would be a great lesson to show students to cover the social studies component. Of course I could not go very deep with John Adams history content for first graders, however, it does connect with standard 1.H.1.3. which is the celebration of President's Day.

Top Tweets of the Week

 Technology is crucial in the classroom. It is amazing how far we have come with technology in the last 20 years. For this graph, you can get an average look at just how much technology is impacting our classrooms. Though the graph looks impressive, I think we as future teachers can do better than this. Some of the percentages are rather low. We as leaders (standard 1 of  NCTCS) need to fully support and encourage more technology in the classroom.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCET3_UuMO_ZMnvIv7QEQNAA
Please check this teacher out. He is a history teacher who records videos on topics for his students. Some of his songs are in depth, some are not. They would be great to incorporate into upper-grade elementary classrooms. For example, fifth grade teaches American History which is what Mr. Betts is teaching right now. He posts a video every Thursday. The link above is to his Youtube channel.

These are some good examples in engaging students in the classroom. As we all know, student engagement can be one of the biggest parts of learning in the classroom. Why? If students are not engaged they are not listening or paying attention. If they are not paying attention, they are certainly not learning. Above are some useful ideas for keeping students engaged such as sharing information with peers, putting a time limit on an activity, and creating competition are just a few ways students can become engaged in the classroom. Please check out here for the complete list of engagement strategies.

For the current event, I wanted to put in the obvious which is happening all around us, FALL. I love the change of colors this time of year. The air is cooler which makes the different colors of leaves change from green to golden, to orange, then to red. However, the conditions must be just right for a pretty fall. The trees must have a lot of rain during the summer so that when the cold season hits, the tree leaves will not shrivel up and fall off. However, a hard rain in early fall may tear all of the leaves off of the trees before they have had a chance to turn color. Hopefully since we have had so much rain, we will have beautiful leaves. The topic for my unit will be about fall leaves so I am excited about doing activites based on leaves with my CE's class.

For the hyperdoc today, I love how you implemented the google docs instead of the slideshow. First of all the Inquiry-Based Learning video was a great engagement piece. It leads me to a more deeper understanding of inquiry and how important it is to the classroom. Like the video said, we do not want to sound like Charlie Brown's teacher. I also like the chart in the video where it shows students spend 13 percent of their time on youtube and 25 percent of their time with Facebook. It ties into the text facilitation my group is working on in chapter 8 which is all about incorporating technology into the classroom. Students learn more at what they are interested in. Your article from Edutopia gives even a more in-depth look at an inquiry by giving examples of inquiry in the classroom. The powtoons youtube video gives a deeper look at the 5E's which is what our entire text facilitation format is based on. I have seen the swimming pool image of inquiry before. I love that example because it is great to show how students are first taught the material, then they experiment with the material then they can explain the material on their own. They go through inquiry-based learning along with knowing the factual content, conceptual targets, procedural, and metacognition targets. Students are eventually lead out in the deep water to swim with the knowledge on their own. Great job to Savannah, Hannah, and Jacobi. Thank you for a powerful presentation on inquiry.

In connection it's the NCTCS, standard 3 would apply to the leaves and with John Adams history. Teachers must know the content they teach so that they can answer student questions. As teachers, some students will eventually ask a question, we do not know. The best thing in the situation is to make up something. No, I was just kidding. The best way to handle the situation is, "I do not know for sure, but I will find out for you." As teachers, we are always learning along with our students. When I go into the classroom, I feel just as much a learner as the students.

I hope each and everyone of you have a great weekend.