Social Studies Methods - Blog 3

Learning Experiences
This past month has been nothing short of exciting! We continue to learn so much and take away so many things to use in our future classroom. A majority of the past few weeks have consisted of our flipped and traditional lesson plans. My main focus for this lesson was national holidays and informative texts. Although I am teaching something different in my clinical, this has been a great opportunity to gain feedback from my peers on ways to improve my teaching once I am able to teach in my classroom. As much as I hate watching myself on video (lol) re watching my teaching segment has provided me with the opportunity to spot areas of both strength and improvement. I am excited to teach my traditional lesson whenever the time comes!

Over the past few weeks, I have been in my clinical completing my hours and working on lesson plans for class. I am in a first grade classroom and my CE is absolutely wonderful. She had been more than willing to work with my schedule and allow me to observe any time needed. I am currently in the process of writing my lessons as well as the context for learning and commentaries for EdTPA. It is so exciting to be in the classroom more and getting to know the sweet kids! Relating to the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards, standard 4 relates to teachers planning based on what is appropriate for his/her students. Throughout my clinical, I am trying my best to plan based off the needs of my students with the given information and data from my CE.


Outside Learning 
Every week or so I try to research and find different resources to use in my classroom. One neat idea is a "turn it in" folder for students to mark how comfortable they feel with how they completed their work after it is turned in. There is a three tray bin, labeled "I totally understand", "Kinda iffy", and "HELP!". This is a great way for teachers to easily spot who needs help if a student is too embarrassed to express this during class time. This is a way to assess students and reteach if necessary.


Future Classroom Connections 

One thing I want to carry into my classroom is the Children's Literature project we conducted in class. Including myself, there will be 13 resources for my peers and I to locate back to once we are student teaching. Each book tied in with a social studies standard strand so we can use them for integrating literacy into our social studies units. Not only will I use these books in my future classroom, but they will become very beneficial to us once we are in our student teaching placements.