Why did I want to be a teacher!

Everyone has a dream of what they want to be when they grow up-some still dream about it. Now, surprisingly, I did not dream about becoming a teacher until late High School. My dream about being a famous Broadway actor with my name in bright, yellow, flashing lights. This all changed summer of my junior year of High School. 

My mother has always been a teacher. She started out in Special Education and now teaches preschool. Being my mother, teaching has always been in my life. I honestly never even thought about becoming a teacher because it was my mother's job. I should also state that my mother is my best friend! 

About the middle of sophomore year, she really wanted to go to this professional development in California for preschool teachers at a preschool called Roseville Community Preschool. This conference was three days long, and taught how important preschool to be hands on! The director, head teacher, and conference leader was by Bev Bos. She has written a multitude of books on how to effectively teach preschool! She loves the idea of hands on activities! Well ,my mother really wanted to go and her preschool paid for her to go. She did not want to go alone, and seeing a spark in myself, invited me to go with her. I saw this as a beach, tanning, relaxing vacation. This turned into a life changing event. This conference was called "Good Stuff For Kids!" and was run by Bev Bos, and the rest of her school staff. 

We went in the middle of July, just my mother and I. We met people from around the world! There was people from Texas, people from Canada, and even people from New York like my mother and I. I learned philosophies of teaching, what is vital in a classroom, activities that are engaging and developmentally appropriate, and so much more. At this time, I did not realize the impact it would have on me. I took this all with a grain of salt. These three days were long, non-stop, and fun! I got to make a fish print from a real fish I painted, have real snails race each other, sing songs and incorporate hand movements, and other preschool activities.

This is was when I realized teaching was the career for me! 

Looking back, it was not just a great memory with my mother that I will always cherish, it was not just a great learning vacation, it was what changed the future of my life! 

I wish I could go back and take more notes and remember more now that  I will use it, but what I do have and do remember will allow myself to become the best possible teacher I can be!  

E-Folio

As a teacher is this day and age, to become a teacher, there are a numerous amounts of steps they have to go through before they get their licensee. This is challenging and stressful, but rightfully so. A teacher is one of the most challenging, but rewarding jobs in the world! They create students to be confident, independent, and creative dreamers. 

One of the steps to achieve a teaching license is edTPA. For our Social Studies Methods class-we created a unit plan to use in this portfolio. We have been currently working on a practice portfolio. This is a wonderful opportunity to see how much time we will need in the future when we are applying for edTPA. 

We, as groups, created lessons to teach to second grade, from a unit. There were four groups and there were four units. This opportunity, to teach a full unit with three different types of lessons, was rewarding and very fulfilling. We have to include this in our practice portfolio. 
Another element of edTPA is to determine our philosophy of teaching. For myself, I learned I was a humanism type of teacher. What a humanism strives to learn from the perspective of human potential growth. This does change for each student. The bigger outcome will allow the world to be a better, responsible world. 

Another element of this practice portfolio is video upload. We recorded myself teaching our units and will upload them to this portfolio. Our professor will then watch our videos, as well as myself and my group members. 

EdTPA may be stressful and may be tricky, but I do think it is important for teachers to be able to write a lesson, teach it, go back and reflect on it. That last piece-reflection- is super important to be able to reflect on our own lessons and see what worked for the future and what did not work. This is vital for every teacher, old, new, any grade, and any subject. 

Current Events

What is a current event? This phrase is vital for each classroom across America! Current Events tie in social studies with literacy in today's classroom. Let's break it up: Current-something that is happening now  and is relevant to the age, location, and child; event- something that happened or is happening. Combined these two words are important for elementary school children to learn because it teaches about other cultures, events that happened or are currently taking place, and how it can impact a society or even themselves.

Current Events with Adjectives. 

My partner and I taught our college students about how important adjectives are on current events. We taught this lesson using a Newsela article. We started out by defining what an adjective is. We then watched a SchoolHouse Rock video on adjectives. This video was amazing to use because it was sung so it was easy to remember, had pictures, and used new adjectives. What made me really appreciate the new adjectives was that it said it, used it in a sentence, and also showed a picture. By doing the three of those, the students hopefully will learn new adjectives to use. Then we asked the students what they say in the video.


After this, we had students share examples of what adjectives were and their examples.
We then had the students read an article on Newsela. The college students were assigned to use the highlighter tool to highlight any adjective they saw. This was vital because it was more practice, and taught the students a new tool to use in the future.

We then made a simple movie about adjectives to share with our teacher peers. My partner and I decided to use the word "young" in this movie. We shared the example from the article, then we created our own example with that word. The assignment was for the students to use the website "wideo.co" and create a adjective movie too! We shared some examples from the class.

This experience was full of new experiences. My partner and I had to use that website that we never used before to create the video. Not only that, but then instruct our students to use that website and create a video. Overall, this lesson went great! I would go over the article more in the future and provide more time for the video creation, but we achieved everything we planned for and my partner and I were content with what was taught.

Other Teaching Groups

There was a total of four groups to teach our second grade class. I was in the third group, so this blog will focus on the three other groups that taught the class.

The first group, being the most difficult because they went first, they did a wonderful job. They had four perspective teachers. Their topic was goods and services. Their three lessons focused on what a good is and what a want is. They seemed to work well together and planned efficiently. What I learned from this group is how a teacher needs to fully think about everything regarding all types of students. I learned how to properly create an evaluation for group/self work. The class we were in, the students were too young to evaluate the group work, so a teacher needs to be able to identify when that is the case and change it to an appropriate way. For this class, it would be a self evaluation.

The second group also had four teachers. Their lessons were about services in our community. I really loved how their direct lesson-their first lesson, they all dressed up as different services, for example: a police officer. They separated their teaching into different elements of the lesson and it worked for each of them.

The third group was my group.

The fourth group to teach was about banks and money. They seemed to be very knowledgeable about this topic. It was interesting to see the three of them teach because they all seemed to be  different types of teachers but they worked well together. The three of them worked very well by means of assigning roles on the lesson. For each lesson, it seemed that they took the same elements for each lesson. They grew strong for their individual parts; however, I'm not sure if they did this on purpose or if that is just a coincidence!

Cooperative Learning

The third type of lesson my group and I taught was cooperative learning. This is all about each person has a specific task to all work together as a group to complete the entire task that is being asked. The way my class was taught to remember this was with an acronym of PIGS and then Face to face. This lesson the students had to work together to become a factory and create an ad. Each student was a manager and had the task of either writing the slogan, drawing, designing, creating the price, etc. The students seemed to love the creative element of this task. I did realize that assigning roles would be challenging to we let the students work together.
The students had the chance to present their ad with the class once everyone was finished and the teachers and I had the listening students guess what the factory was. They all seemed to really enjoy this element of the lesson.
My wish for the future is that as a class, we went over how to properly present and how to properly listen to a group presenting. The students, I noticed, got shy and turned away when present or spoke too quietly. While the listeners did their own work or their focus was not on the group presenting. If we had the chance to go back and had a little bit more time, I would have spoke about this.

Teaching Inquiry

For the second lesson, my group and I had to teach an inquiry lesson. This lesson I focused on writing the lesson plan. By this point, my group and I learned about each other and how each of us work. Inquiry is the idea that a problem needs to be solved. The class we were working with find group work exciting, but they can get too loud or off topic easy. My two cooperating teachers and I really tried to keep every student focused. They really seemed to enjoy working with their peers. I learned a lot from doing group work with the class because as a teacher, they must keep on top of the entire class, not just the group they are working closely with.
We used a fairly new technology to me: a Voki. A Voki is an animated figure that speaks whatever you type it to say. We created the Voki to present our problem: the truck driver needs to deliver goods and does not know where to start and finish. The students seemed to find it very funny and knew exactly what the problem is. As a backup, we printed out a letter as to what the Voki exactly said. This also was beneficial to hand out and have the students read along with the voice speaking or go back to re-read the problem.

Direct Teaching

I have finally taught in front of an entire class. While I had two partners and we worked as a team, it was quite the learning experience. Working as a group to teach a lesson is quite the challenge. All three of us have unique ideas and opportunities to fulfill our dreams. By each of us having ideas, we had the opportunity to challenge each other to see how can we create the best lesson possible. at first there were so many worksheets. Probably too many for our second graders. We decided to throw some technology into the lesson replacing two of the worksheets. One of them was a vortex Smartboard game placing phrases into two category. The other was a tic-tac-toe game.

What was great about it was it got the students so excited and involved with the lesson. The downer was when we arrive at the classroom...their technology was not up to date so all of our games would not work! Thank goodness we had backups! I knew from prior experience, not mine own,- but watching others, that when using technology...ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP. I printed out the slides onto paper to have a manual opportunity in case this happened...thanks goodness I did because we needed that wonderful backup option. This also went really well even though the technology did not work. I learned also how loud the class gets when given the opportunity. This may just be this particular class, but it did get quite noisy when unexpected. while my first classroom experience was hopeful for an amazing, perfect lesson, reality does kick in and challenges come up. I appreciate the challenges because they will happen in the future and while I am officially a teacher. It has taught me so much more than any lecture or textbook could. I could have been told or read about challenges, but unless the situation pops up into a future lesson, le
arning can only happen when tried.