Week 12-Field

What? This week was the second week of field experience. We had the opportunity to teach and help out more and also to teach 2 social studies lessons. For the first social studies lesson we taught we created a power point but we weren't able to hook up the computer at the school so were weren't able to use it. Erica and I have learned a lot about accommodating when things don't work out exactly the way we planned. The second time we taught created the power point in Google Presentations so we were able to use the teachers computer to do the power point. Google Presentations is very helpful because so long as you have the internet you have access to your presentation.

So What? I have actually enjoyed working with and teaching the 6th graders more than I thought I would. I was so scared to teach them because I want to teach 2nd or 3rd grade. I never thought I would do well working with the older kids but I have actually enjoyed it. This field experience has helped me to realize that I can do things that I originally thought I could not do. It is good to be able to try new things and gain different experiences and a new perspective on my abilities.

We were able to incorporate art into one of the lessons we taught this week. we taught the students about different city states in Ancient Greece and then we divided the students into groups and assigned each group to be a different city state: Athens, Sparta, Thebes, etc. and had them create a flag representing their city state. We gave them an info card about their city state and told them to use that information to create their flag. The kids had a lot of fun with it and I think it will really help them remember the information about the city state they did their flag on.

Now What? I have learned a lot from watching my cooperating teacher teach the students. There are a lot of things that I would do similar to what she does and other things that I would do completely different. It is fun to get ideas from her and see different approaches to teaching so I can find out better what way I would like to teach and to see first hand how these things apply in the real classroom and how students respond to these teaching methods. I know that in my future classroom I will teach math different than she does. The kids do not seem to understand the math very well at all. There are a lot of things I would try differently.