The end is here! I can’t believe that we have reached the end of science methods. This has been a great semester of learning. I have learned so many things that I can take into my science classroom. This past month has been good because I was able to focus on my unit plan. I decided a while back to write a unit on the solar system. I had no idea how much fun I would have planning this unit and I was even able to teach a lesson to my 3rd graders based on my unit. I feel that this is a good unit that I can continue to use in my future teaching career.
As I was teaching my lesson, I encountered some struggles. I love to implement technology into my lessons. It is not only an integral part of every lesson, but it makes everything so much more interactive and interesting for the students. However, with technology there can be some hiccups. During my lesson, the SmartBoard in our classroom was doing things by itself and acting crazy. This taught me a good lesson though to always have back-up plans in case something does go wrong and to have good classroom management because if something does go wrong with the technology that can make the students go crazy. It is important to manage your classroom so this doesn’t have a negative impact on the teaching. I felt that I learned many lessons from teaching and planning this unit.
Over the next month, I will be focusing on preparing for student teaching. Over Christmas break, I plan on completing things that can be done ahead of time so that I can be fully focused and ready to tackle the semester ahead.
This past month we have worked together as classmates to finish the semester strong. We are able to work together to collaborate and share ideas. We really do have a great group of student teachers and I am blessed to be a part of it!
For my outside learning this month, I found a list of 30 things to remember while student teaching from Scholastic. Many of these we have heard before through orientations and meetings, but this is a great print-out friendly list that I will print out and keep in my student teaching binder.
I have loved implementing Twitter in my education career. Here are 3 more tweets I have found this month.
Everyone knows I'm a sucker for a virtual museum. This takes students on a tour to help them understand 3D printing. I will enjoy it as much as the students!
This is a short clip that really helps you think of ways to get students collaborating and communicating. It gives "Talk Moves" which are ways to get students to begin discussions instead of just letting them go freely. Sometimes students need that extra guidance.
This is an activity that Discovery Education is having classrooms all over the country participate in. It allows students to follow along the flight and even see what other students are learning about in regards to this topic through Twitter Chats.
This past month, NASA has successfully landed on Mars. This was a great thing to implement into my solar system lesson plan. My CE pulled this up at the end of the lesson. However, I feel now that this would have been a great hook to get the students interested. This is proof that NASA is making great strides to get to know more about our solar system. This will be great as I continue to teach the solar system in the future.
In regards to the NCTCS, I learned that data is CRUCIAL for analyzing student learning. I was able to dig deep into this standard and understand how to collect data that can truly assist us in analyze student learning and our teaching.
We are headed to student teaching!
