Finishing Social Studies Methods!!!

As all of my work is in its final touches, I am excited to be finishing up Social Studies Methods. I have learned a lot this semester. Much like Science Methods, I learned a lot of new technologies to use in class. One of the most interesting pieces of technology that I had learned about was Mentimeter. This was a website that allows you to ask the class questions to which they can answer with words to make a word cloud or even simple multiple choice words. What makes this website different is that the results come in real time. The website will automatically save the results and email them to the creator. This would be a very useful tool to use in my classroom one day to get the students engaged and excited about many topics, not just Social Studies. Another great piece of technology that we had learned about is ThingLink. We had used this tool last year in science to teach the class about the different layers of the Atmosphere, but I think ThingLink is a much more effective tool for Social Studies. You could use this tool to bring the students virtually to any place in the world to make lesson come to life. Imagine being able to take your students on a field trip to Ancient Rome or a battlefield during the Civil War.

Along with new technology, I had learned about a new type of lesson plan. The cooperative lesson plan is something that is very useful in a classroom. Students working in groups often doesn't go well because one student will often end up doing all of the work. To prevent this from happening, it is important to use the PIGS  model. In this model, the students must evaluate the work of their peers and themselves to ensure that all of the students pull their own weight and contributes to the overall project. What makes cooperative lessons really special is group processing. The students reflect on the feedback that they and their peers had given them to better their performance in the future. It is very important to reflect on the work that the students have done because it allows them to process how much they really know about the topic and it helps them to become a stronger group member in their future groups.

Overall, I feel that this semester has been very successful. I couldn't have done it without my group of Social Studies Super Stars. Megan, Anna, Nicole, and Rachel are all very bright and dedicated students. Together I think we were able to create very engaging and strong lesson plans. We all shared ideas with one another and were able to complete very creative lessons. The only "failures" that we experienced was in time management. Our lessons were very creative and with the creativity, there was a great deal of information that the students needed to learn. In our future classrooms, our lessons would not have been as crunched for time so we would have been able to have every child share during out vocab game and the students would have been able to create bigger and better posters. In the time frame we had, we didn't have to cut much out of the lessons that we had wanted to do and with the great responses we had from our students, I wouldn't say time management was a failure. I would definitely love to use the vocabulary game that we had done with our students in my classroom one day. I will also definitely use artifact bags in my future class. I was very excited and engaged by all of the artifact bags my colleagues brought in, so I know my future students would definitely be engaged as well. I thought all of the different artifacts my colleagues brought in like dream catchers, Barbie dolls, and a lego white house were so creative.

Though I am going to miss everyone in my class and especially the fifth graders we worked with. I am glad to be finishing up my classes this semester and am ready to take all that I have learned in Student Teaching in the fall.  Congratulations to everyone in Social Studies Methods on a great semester and thank you to Dr. Smrinova for all that you have taught me. Fireworks!