Time To Pass It On

It is sad to say that this is our last class and it is now time for my last post on the semester. Throughout this course I learned a lot of valuable content that I will take with student teaching and further experiences. One aspect that I really enjoyed from this course was blogging. Blogging seems tedious and a waste of time, but it is actually the opposite. Writing every week helps you summarize what you did on that specific week and it also helps organize your thoughts. I plan on implementing this within my classroom and I hope I have enough time to do it as well. Another attribute that really helped me excel in this course was incorporating the different means of technology. Being an ITE major I knew a couple of ways to implement technology, but this class goes more in depth with the concept. I learned how to use technology through the direct, inquiry, and cooperative lesson plans. These three lesson plans were vital to learn with teaching at Bishop Dunn. Before this class began we were required to fill out a self evaluation sheet based on the concepts that were taught in this course. There were a few pieces of content that I was unfamiliar with, but I can see the growth I made throughout the course. Some of these concepts included: the different types of lessons, using some technology tools and a few other aspects. One of the first attributes that we learned in this course were the three lesson plan formats. Through this we were asked to use them within our teaching session at Bishop Dunn. It took a little while to get the idea of how to write the three lessons, but Dr. Smirnova guided us through the process. With her help and collaboration from my peers I learned how to write a well formatted lesson. Through this course we were also asked to research some philosophy of teaching. My philosophy of teaching would follow a constructivism approach. The constructivist involves students to learn by experiencing certain aspects. This would be through the inquiry method where it states hands on, minds on. Students are manipulating materials or reflecting on their experience. According to Concept of the Classroom, "Constructivist teachers encourage students to constantly assess how the activity is helping them gain understanding. By questioning themselves and their strategies, students in the constructivist classroom ideally become "expert learners" (p. 1). As mentioned before this philosophy will help students become expert learners. Relating the concept to expert learners can be correlated to the Bloom's Taxonomy Pyramid. This concept was also taught throughout the course and is meaningful for teachers to follow by. In my other ITE courses, this concept is mentioned through the issue of technology and how to implement the vocabulary of Bloom's Taxonomy within a lesson plan. Using these key terms will help you construct a better lesson plan. This theory will help students reach a higher level and will also help reach mastery level on the content. I plan on using this through teaching because it will supply a guideline for the students and myself. At the end of Science Methods I was a little more comfortable with the content and it also helped that I had a chance to look everything over. I am glad that I took this course at the end of my college career and I am happy to know that I learned a lot in this classroom. This successful course would have not been possible if it wasn't for Dr. Smirnova. She pushed me to excel and go above and beyond expectations. This outlook inspired me to be a better me. I would like to finish this last blog with a quote by Sidney Sugerman, "Teach the young people how to think, not what to think."

Below are the list of people I used to comment on their blogs:

• Dorian
• Danielle
• Melissa

Let's Trade Books

Today was an exciting day because we did a book talk and trailer. I learned a lot through this experience because everyone had different ways of approaching these two topics. Before I started to construct my project I first had to pick a book that is related to the topic I taught at Bishop Dunn. The first book I thought of was Super Worm. Super Worm is an engaging book for students because it rhymes and it touched upon the concept of consumers. I've also used this book for another class to do reciprocal teaching. The first step I took for this project was filling out the trade book format. This gave me an idea of what standards and activities that I would conduct with the students. Some of the activities I decided to do with the students is to have them create a food chain and food web with the organisms that are included within the book. This will help them learn the differences between food webs and food chains. Another activity that I would have the students design is having them create another superhero in the book. I will leave the imagination up to to the students, but it must relate to the food web and food chains because that is the main point in this book. After I designed my activities I then had to think of how I would create my book trailer. This book trailer had to be geared toward students and it should make them want to read the book. There so many tools to choose from, therefore, I decided to pick GoAnimate. I've used this tool multiple times and I enjoy making videos off of it. As soon as I opened up Go Animate all of my ideas came spilling out. When I was making this video I laughed a lot. Which means if I was laughing I can only imagine how the students would enjoy this video. After putting all the pieces together I was finally done with the video and it came out perfect. To the right of this blog I posted the final product. Please feel free to watch and enjoy the book trailer. When I was done creating everything it was time to put everything altogether. As a class we presented our projects and how we would fit them into our own classroom. My fellow teacher candidates all did it different ways which was wonderful to see because it kept everyone on their toes. A lot of peers used Animoto for their book trailer because they felt very comfortable with the tool. Everyone did an excellent job with engaging the our class and explaining how it will be implemented in their own classroom. I think this project was a great exercise for us to do because it helped us understand that their are different ways to bring in new tools in the classroom. Also, it gave us an idea of how to use trade books in our own class. It is important to use trade books because it will help students see different connections. I hope to use this technique when I start student teaching and even in the future. Until next time bloggers :)

Science In The News

For this specific topic we were asked to design a lesson around science in the news. It is important to incorporate current event in lessons because it keeps the students involved with aspects happening around them. In Social Studies Methods class, we were asked to design a lesson for a second grade classroom. For Science Method our articles were based on Astronomy and I used Newsela to these articles. Newsela is a great tool to use within the classroom because every article has a different Lexile level to accommodate students reading levels. According to the website Newsela, "Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant: daily news. It's easy and amazing" (About Newsela Page). I would definitely incorporate this tool within my classroom because it will help students stay up-to-date with events and give another source of enhancing their reading skills. While looking through this wonderful site I decided to pick a few articles that are related with Astronomy. The first articles that popped up were things about space and travel. I decided to pick these topics because I haven't been hearing a lot about the travels that civilians are taking to space. We had to choose seven articles for this assignment and I tried to get them to relate to one another. I wanted to keep the articles the same because if I was teaching this topic to the classroom they have articles that they can choose from. It will help them gravitate towards whichever article looks pleasing to them. If you give student choices it will allow them to be more interested in the specific topic. This lesson can be done through the cooperative lesson or even inquiry. It depends on how the teacher wants to conduct it in her classroom. Personally, current events are excellent to do with cooperative lessons. In order for this to succeed through a cooperative lesson the students will have to read the articles on their own time. Having the students read the articles on their own time can also be seen as flipped classroom. A flipped classroom is when students are asked to complete assignments before the teacher teaches them any material. The students are learning and exploring on their own. Therefore, I would use this aspect before teaching them about this topic so they can become more diverse in the topic. After the students have read the articles it is important for the teacher to explain any misconceptions that the students had while reading. This will eliminate any confusions before starting to work with their fellow peers. Through the collaboration section, students will answer questions based on their given article. The strategy the students will be using would be analyzing. This will help the students with comprehension skills and will make them go into further depth on the topic. In order for all the students to collaborate they must use a Web 2.0 tool so that they can work on one forum. The tool I used for Social Studies Method was Linot. Linot is a forum where students can work together and post a sticky note that explains their answers. There are other web 2.0 tools out there other than this given tool. Another tool that can be used for this assignment is padlet. Padlet is just like Linot where everyone can post their thoughts on the discussion board. I would use this tool for this specific assignment. When everyone is done analyzing the questions, the students will come together and explain their answers to the whole class. This way all students are hitting the 5 PIGS through this lesson. I feel that students will benefit through this lesson and it will be engaging for them. The way I organized my articles was through Symbaloo. This will make it easier for the students to pick the articles. Therefore, below is the link to the Symbaloo page I created. Please feel free to click it and look through the articles. Until next time bloggers :)

Symbaloo Science In The News