The Ending of a Beautiful Beginning

The Ending of a Beautiful Beginning

     I started this semester being overwhelmed with the work that was put out in front of me. I felt that it was too much and I wouldn't be able to accomplish what I wanted to, to the best of my abilities. I was wrong. I have proven myself and although I faced a few new challenges along the way, I reached my ultimate goal of completing this course. I feel relieved that I have finished this course and I know that in my heart, I truly expressed myself to my fullest potential. 

     I enjoyed my experience throughout the course. It was interesting and very engaging with the amount of work and the type of lessons that we had to develop. I enjoyed every minute of it and it is something that I will carry with me throughout my education career. The learning outcomes of this course were clearly stated in the beginning and even though I felt that I often got confused or frustrated throughout my experience, I found this experience to be long worth while. Thanks to this course, I feel comfortable and confident as a future educator that will teach Social Studies. I didn't have nearly as much confident as I do now in the beginning. I learned a lot about designing lesson plans for Social Studies and how I can personally make Social Studies a memorable experience for students. Out of all of my successes, my greatest success was completing the livebinder e-folio. When I first took a look at the livebinder, I was shocked and astonished upon seeing how much work needed to be put into it and as the final group to complete their field work, I felt as if we were at a disadvantage. I completed my unit plan and e-folio and I feel that my livebinder is as perfect as I could make it. I don't believe that I had any major failures throughout this course because I make sure that my school work is my major priority and that is exactly what I did. 

     I gained a lot from this experience. The experience has benefit me in a variety of ways. I will take my experience with me throughout my education career and it will always have an impact in my future profession. I learned so much about teaching Social Studies. Thanks to my experience, my future Social Studies classroom will be full of engaging props and resources that I can use to help with creating the most interactive, encouraging lessons that I possibly can. I noticed that to transform a "boring" subject, you have to make it interesting and intriguing to the student's eye and that is just what I plan to do. It's sad to think that now my Social Studies experience in college has come to an end, but I am excited to move onto the next chapter in my life. 

Thank you Dr. Smirnova for making this experience something that I will cherish forever.
Thanks to you, now I feel confident with being a successful, powerful Elementary Social Studies.

Mock Interview Extravaganza

Mock Interview Extravaganza

     Upon preparation for this mock interview, I was actually really nervous even though in the back of my mind, I knew that this wasn't a real interview or that I was being interviewed by my friends. I was still very nervous because this was my first "interview" ever. I had to prepare myself for my first interview. I literally googled "Job Interview Tips for Teachers," and located to the left is the chart that I followed. So the night before, I made myself prepared for the next day.

     When walking into class, I took a deep breath and I walked in normally as I would for any ordinary day for field work, well dressed and with a teaching mind set. I knew what I wanted and I knew how to achieve my goal which was by being myself and expressing my knowledge on the educational concepts with a smile on my face. I was not prepared for the questions that were asked, but I never messed up. I didn't stall or leave any time for an awkward silence. I answered the questions accordingly and I believed that I did a good job with doing so.    

     Throughout each of the interviews, I kept my head up with a friendly smile and I was prepared for anything that came my way. Each of the "administrators" were looking for specific teachers and the school that said that they would hire me was the school that was built around Direct Instruction for success. I thought that this was interesting because Direct Instruction is not my favorite style to teach, but I was told that I was logical in the content area. I was relieved when the administrator had said my name because it was like an eye opener that I truly am in the right profession area. 

     What I specifically liked about this experience was that this type of interview is an engaging and entertaining way to get all of the "butterflies" out of your stomach. After this experience, I felt like I could jump right into a real interview with confidence. I'm looking forward to my interviews in the future thanks to this experience. This is definitely something I enjoyed and would recommend to other students to partake in before actually going on an interview. 

The Exhibition for Free School Lunch

The Exhibition for Free School Lunch

     Throughout my educational career as a student, I never once thought that I would be finding a current event to use through a different point of view. I had always been used to writing essays on current events and whether I agreed with them or not, but this time, the purpose of finding a current event was to tie the content in with special theme. That is the purpose of using a current event in the classroom. The current event should be something that the students are somewhat already familiar with and can possibly relate to on some level. A lesson that incorporates the use of a current event should be student friendly and relate to the Social Studies concept at hand in some sort of way. Current events will let the students know about what is going on outside of the country or what is happening in other places rather than just the state that the students live in. A current event lesson could also reflect what is going on in the local community.

Click here to view the Google Slides presentation. 

The current event type of cooperative learning lesson that my group and I collaboratively designed revolved around the article, Free School Lunch for More Students. This news article can be found on Newsela. At first, my group members and I wanted to design a mini-lesson in which it would relate to a concept in our Unit Plan and that concept is voting. The topic for voting for free school lunch would be a suitable topic because it is something that is age-appropriate, education friendly, and something that directly relates to the students. We had fantastic reactions to our inquiry lesson plan when our students had to vote for the best principal candidate, so this lesson we thought would be the best direction to turn to. All of our ideas for this mini-lesson came directly from us and were original. Not only did we use a news article, but we also found two videos that revolved around the same concept which can be viewed below.

Elementary School Kitchen Manager Fired For Giving Free Lunches To Hungry Students

School lunch: Is $1.50 a child enough?

     Both of these videos are relevant to the current event topic of deciding to chose free lunch or not. The method that we chose was to use Padlet in a cooperative learning technique that revolved around Think-Pair-Share and Talking Circles. I felt that these methods were wonderful to use because the students needed to collaborate and express their thoughts in a conversation before voting. The overall experience was an enjoyable and memorable experience that I will always remember when using current events in my own classroom. 

Current Events in my Future Classroom

     When thinking about using a current event in my future classroom, I can only express how much of an engaging adventure it will be. I believe that using a current event to express a point in the classroom or even to just make the students aware of the world outside the classroom is a fantastic approach to teaching social studies. There are websites and news print that can be addressed in student-friendly terms that can apply what is going on in the news to the students in which they will understand. I also learned that you don't have to base your current events on only videos or hard copies, but you can use the internet to your advantage and find so many articles that you can use. I definitely know that I am going to use Newsela and Tween Tribune in my future practice. I enjoyed using Newsela to find current event articles, it's very simple to use and easy to find articles for a specific subject. I liked how you can literally pick which age group you are aiming for and which subject you are looking to teach. I think that Newsela will be a website that is effective for all teachers to use, especially when they are teaching social studies specifically because of how much access the teachers can have to current event related resources. With the use of this website, the students can even use this feature to find current event articles to explore because there is a teacher/student setting on Newsela. I love that about this website and I think that, that particularly is what makes this website effective when teaching social studies.  When thinking about teaching with current events to different age students, it all depends on their age. Current events can be used with all students, but you should always make sure that the articles are at the students reading level in which they can comprehend what they are reading. I would also make sure that the engaging experiences that correspond with the current event would reflect the grade level appropriateness depending on the grade.