I know we are getting close to the end when Jessica's Micro teaching is about reviewing what we have learned thus far! It is amazing to look back on all that we have done and how it all ties together so smoothly. I think Jessica did really good having us go back and think in categories. It made me really think about the different theories, concepts, skills, and experiences and how they all tie together. For example, a concept is Aims, Goals, and Objectives, a skill we learned was writing objectives, a theory is Bloom's taxonomy which is used in writing objectives and an experience we learned is writing a unit plan. It is comfortable knowing that everything I learned in this class is going to be carried with me the rest of my teaching career. So after Jessica's microteaching Dr. Smirnova shared a very informative PowerPoint about Models, Strategies and Methods. There are four types of models. Behavioral which is a broad approach to teaching, which develops the basic skills and knowledge. Information Processing is through questions and exploration . Social Interactive model focus on social skills, that students learn better when they interact. Personal Model is focused on developing the student's self esteem. Strategies are a set of steps you have to follow. Direct are aligned with behavioral, very teacher focused. Indirect/cognitive are aligned with information processing, there are specific steps. It starts class with a problem or a puzzle type situation. Indirect/interactive aligns with social interactive, learning through exploration. Indirect/Individual is aligned with Personal, which focuses on the individual student. Methods are more specific ways of reaching goals. There are hundreds of methods. Each model has methods/activities that can fit into them. Lecture is a form of behavioral model, Problem solving can be used with information-processing, Field Trips used in experimental model, Homework used in Personal model and Think-Pair-Share in Social Interactive Model. Learning the models, strategies and methods was interesting because it makes you realize that there is more to teaching than just lecture, which I feel was a big part of the education I had. It is important to incorporate all of the different behaviors because it focuses on the student learning by themself, the teacher, and their classmates. After the PowerPoint Dr. Smirnova allowed us to work on our Unit Plans in class. Which was really nice to be able to be in class working on our unit plan design because if you get stuck then you have your classmates or Dr. Smirnova right there to help you out. Overall, this class just confirmed to me how fast this semester is coming to a close!!!

Practice, Practice, Practice!!

As Dr. Smirnova says, "Practice, Practice, Practice!" Which rings very very true for learning how to write out objectives! For me, it was very confusing how to write out these objectives for my Unit plan on Communities around the United States , but I think I finally got it down!
1. Pick a standard, such as History of the United States and New York 2. Pick a key idea from that standard, such as "important ideas, social and cultural values, beliefs, and traditions from New York State and United States history illustrate the connections and interactions of people and events across time and from a variety of perspectives". 3. Pick goals you want the students to achieve in the lesson, Student will know about the history of the community they live in. 4. Pick out a performance indicator from the standard, "Students gather and organize information about the traditions transmitted by various groups living in their neighborhood and community." 5. Write out an objective, Given books on their community, have the student create a timeline following a rubric and scoring at least 3/4. An important thing to remember when writing out your objective is you have to follow CBC. Condition-Behavior-Criteria. The condition is the setting of the tasks and materials. Behavior measures what the student is expected to do and criteria is important because it says where a student should be performing at a certain time. These are important to be included in the objectives because it focuses on the student and on getting them to a higher level of learning. There is so much information coming in to help develop this Unit Plan, and each piece of information that is coming in is making me realize how much goes into making a Unit Plan. And with each thing I learn I get more and more excited to see the Unit Plan come together and to see the finished product. I feel like this class will be coming in handy for many, many years to come!

Bloom's triangle of thinking!!!

It is finally here! Time to buckle down and start getting a move on with this Unit Plan!!! I picked the topic of Communities Around the United States for a few reasons. I love the younger grades and since the beginning grades focus on learning about communities I figured that would be the most interesting topic for me to focus on. On NYLearns.org website it describes the curriculum of second grade social studies as looking at communites around the United States. I am looking forward to designing this unit plan and am excited to start looking at what activities should be incorporated, along with thinking of a good culminating project. It should be a great learning experience. A major topic of class has been Bloom's Taxonomy. The chart on the left represents the six levels of Blooms taxonomy...the revised version. The old version had Evaluating and Creating switched. Along with the words being replaced from nouns t verbs. The chart basically represents a learning tool in the classroom. It focuses on six levels of thinking, from basic to higher levels of thinking. Lower levels of thinking are Remembering and Understanding and the hgher levels of thinking include the top four. Remembering- involves recalling previous learned information. Understanding involves grasping the infromation just learned by interpreting it. Applying involves taking the information just learned and using it in a new way. Analysing is breaking information into parts. Evaluating involves the students making in depth reflection and making decisions based on these reflections. Creating is the highlest level of thinking and has the student creating new ideas from previous learned information. All of these levels of thinking should be incorporated into the classroom activies. The culminating project should involve the highest level of thinking, creating. It was good that we had lots of practice with using these six levels because it is a good guide to follow when creating activities.

Aims, Goals, Objectives

Even though we had off from class for Spring Break doesn't mean that there wasn't any work to be done! Webquests and Microteaching sure did keep me busy over break!! Looking through the Webquests was actually pretty interesting and fun. It is amazing how many teachers go out there and are willing to share their lesson plans. It is great knowing there is a place to go where there are so many ideas you can borrow from other teachers. Some of these lesson plans were really cool and included a lot of fun resources from the Web! Webquests.
There is the sight and it allows you to search any subject and grade level, it's very easy!

After searching around Webquests for a while it was time for me to start thinking about my Microteaching on Aims, Goals, and Objectives. Dr. Smirnova introduced me to this really cool site Xtranormal.
Lesson Gone Wrong Here is the video I made for my microteaching.


This site is pretty cool, the websites motto is pretty much the point of the website, "If you can type, you can make movies." It was really cool to make a script then pick the setting, characters, and camera angles to go along with it. It also made me really think about the difference of Aims, Goals, and Objectives.
Aims are the most general statements are basically refer to National standards and are statements about general learning outcomes.
Goals are more specific then aims which include state standards. They are statements of educational intention.
Objectives are specific statements which teachers can formulate.

Before my microteaching Bridgett had her microteaching for content analysis. I thought she did an awesome job. She made her peanut butter sandwhich and really had the class tell her every little thing to do to make the sandwhich. It made us understand that content anaylsis really makes you think of every single, little step that is involved in planning and teaching. I thought my microteaching went well, aside from the video having no sound. I felt comfortable in front of the class and glad I could still carry on introducing Aims, Goals, and Objectives without my video!