Group 1 Inquiry! On Thursday, February 12, Group 1 conducted their Inquiry lesson plan where the students followed a WebQuest. To begin the lesson, the teachers had the students log onto Google Classroom. This took much longer than they expected and it really took away from the lesson. At first, I thought it was taking so long because the students were doing a pre-assessment on there. However, after they finally logged on, the teachers had the students do a Kahoot! for a pre-assessment. The idea was good, but it didn't turn out so great in practice. The students, as you might expect, got too excited playing the game and I think it got the teachers a bit more frazzled after their technical difficulties. This lead to some chaos in the room. I must commend them on how they were able to recover and get the students to be so quiet while they were working on their independent practice. All of the students were practically silent and diligently working. The students seemed very intere
Posts
Newburgh Ministry! On Friday, I volunteered at the Newburgh Ministry for MSMC's Project Jumpstart. I was a bit nervous about the area at first. I felt fairly uncomfortable getting out of my car and walking in there by myself. The next time I go, I am signed up to go with people from my group so I should feel a bit more comfortable. Aside from arriving, the rest of the night was a lot of fun. When I first got there, the kids were coloring and doing crossword puzzles. I sat down with the kids that were there and helped a little girl who was 4 years old color in one of the pages. Once everyone one arrived, Miss Veronica brought the kids over to do some yoga to get them ready for the night. I followed along with the yoga and it was fun. After that, each student got an iPad and was able to research different thing they could find in the ocean. The wifi wasn't working right so I help the kids sign onto the hotspot on my phone. I helped the little boy in the picture above find some
Group 1 Direct Instruction! Yesterday, Group 1 started off our fieldwork experience with the first direct instruction lesson. They taught the students about the branches of government, the bill of rights, and the constitution. I thought overall they did very well. I thought they all knew their content and that they did a great job of projecting their voices. I really liked their guided practice activity. Durin that activity, they gave each table a different set of terms. The definitions for these terms, which were events and other key concepts like the constitution, were put up on the SMART board and were read aloud by one of the teachers. The student had to discuss as a group what the correct term was and then look through the one they had to see they had the right answer. The group that did have the right answer got to go and put it up on the board. I felt that the student really liked this activity. I think the independent practice could have been a bit more reflective. Group one
Pre-Assessments and Getting to Know You Activities! Yesterday we started another round of fieldwork! This round of fieldwork, much like last semester, will be carried out at Bishop Dunn Memorial School . I was very excited to meet the new set of students and to be working with the fifth-grade. When I first started at the Mount, I was convinced that I only wanted to work with the youngest students in the first or second grade, but after a few years of fieldwork, I am starting to think I might like the fifth-grade more. I think this will be a great semester! All of the students we so bright and eager to learn. To get to know these amazing social studies superstars, we played a board game with the students. The board game consisted of three types of questions, questions to get to know the student, questions for them to get to know us, and social studies superstar questions to give them the opportunity to show their knowledge. I was pleased to see how engaged all of our students were th
The News of the World! Today I attended one of the Library Week events pertaining to the books the News of the World , by Paulette Jiles. This book is a historical fiction novel about a man named Captian Jefferson Kyle Kidd who tells the news of the world to the people of the US by riding around on a horse and reading the newspaper to people across the growing United States. At the event, the Dominican Scholars lead the discussion and broke down how the book touches could be applied to the four pillars of the Dominican Scholars. The four pillars are study, service, spirituality, and community. They talked about the how the book touched on the study pillar when Captian Kidd teaches Johanna English and no matter how challenging the process was, they never gave up. The book touches on service when it talks about Captian Kidd being a soldier in the War of 1812. It was brought up how it was interesting that the book actually touched upon Captian Kidd's PTSD. I have never really though
What were the takeaways of the getting to know you activity? Each time you start a new class, it is important to get to know the people who will be your colleagues for the next few months. Getting to know them will make you more comfortable with them and will allow you to have a sense of comunity in the classroom. The Getting to Know You activity we did in our Social Studies class was a special version of this comuity building exercise. It was special in the fact that it was digital. Being digital, everyone in the class was not only able to learn a little bit more about eachother, but we were all able to learn about differnt tools that could help us improve our lesson plans in the future. I learned about so many resources I have never heard of before from this activity, like podomatic , a site that allows you to create a voice memo, and tiki toki , a site that lets you create a 3D time line. In my own project I used two sites called QR Code Monkey and Straw Poll. These were very h