Making differences....

It is hard to believe that I have been in graduate school for a year now. Over the past year I have completed six classes and am enrolled in three as I type. Throughout these nine classes I have had the chance to participate in many hours of fieldwork. Even though a lot of these hours have been reserved for purely observing, there has been some where I had the pleasure of teaching/ co-teaching. I hope that I had made some sort of impact during my hours in school, incorporating all the lessons I have learned at Mount Saint Mary. I believe in taking everything I learned in my classes and incorporating them into my fieldwork hours. Even though all I have done so far is observe this semester, I have yet to teach...I would hope that taking the lessons I have put so much time in creating will stick with the students over time. I am very excited to be able to use technology into my teaching. I feel that students learn more when they are actively engaged in the lesson, and technology is the best way to do this, I feel. My cooperating teaching has been amazing with me, and helped me along the way. She allows me to have my freedom and take over class, I can only imagine how hard that must be! But it is so nice knowing there are teachers out there that are willing to hand over their classes to an education student and teach their students. Even though I can not comment on this Fieldwork yet, there has been a classes fieldwork that has stuck in my mind. In my Emergent Literacy class I was able to work one on one after school with a student at Bishop Dunn. It was probably so far one of the best experiences I had during Fieldwork. Week after week I created lessons to be done over the span of an hour to help with the student's literacy. I hope she had as much as I had creating the lessons, because it was quite fun for me! I got to create stories, posters, and drawings with her as we read tons of literacy, while introducing punctuation, and quotations. Seeing her grasp the information I was giving her was a great feeling. I loved seeing her enjoy these lessons I created and being enthusiastic about what we were going to do the next week. I feel like I didn't have to do anything differently and noticed that she was grasping the information by having her tell me what we did the week before in an activity. It was hard figuring out ways to engage the student week after week, but the easiest part was seeing her have fun learning, which is what I hope will happen many more times during my fieldwork experiences here at Mount Saint Mary College.

Time Flies....

Wow, it has been a month! I have no idea where the time goes, but it sure does fly when you are busy with three classes! Methods is continuing to be a huge learning experience with lots of new information being learned. Our latest adventure has been Direct Instruction. Remember all the countless hours you sat in class listening to your teacher lecture non-stop? Yup, that is direct instruction! And there is a point behind it! It is a great way to introduce a topic and promote automaticity! By repeating the basic information over and over again, you drill it into the students heads. It is actually a great way to introduce topics because it allows you as a teacher to deliver the information to students with no distractions. For example, I created my direct instruction lesson plan on Plants. I was sure to incorporate technology into my direct instruction plan. Just because you are delivering the basics, does not mean you can't have room for a little creativity! I incorporated using the SMARTboard by showing a picture of a plant.. Then slowly I showed each part of the plant and describe what the part's function is for. The students join in by repeating the parts of the plants and functions throughout the lessons.
Aside from my Direct Instruction lesson plan, I created a WebQuest. This allows the student to take the information they just learned and create a book on TikaTok. The students are on an adventure to prove that plants are living things. The students are split into groups and are assigned to research different aspects of plants. This Webquest is a great interactive lesson for students to get a hands on experience on learning. I hope that when I have my own classroom I am able to create tons of WebQuests on different topics because I believe in the students right to be creative.