Week Eleven

As the semester is beginning to come to a close, I am starting to find my workload increasing more! This week at Washington, I was able to work with a group of students developing their writing skills. I was impressed with what my first graders could do. They looked at pictures that told a story, then answered questions about the pictures. The story cards they were given gave students the beginning of a sentence, and they had to finish the sentence in their own words. I really enjoyed this activity with my students and being able to share my love of writing with them. I also experienced my first professional development opportunity this week and it was so much fun! I went to Duke and attended a symposium on fetal alcohol syndrome and how it affected students in the classroom. It was very eye opening to listen to the speakers talk about their own personal experiences and how important it was for teachers to recognize a child who may be suffering from FASD. I know that in my future classroom, I will more than likely have at least one student who is on the spectrum and just like standard 2 states, I must adapt my teaching to benefit my students with special needs.

Also this week, I have been working on my flipped lesson plan and my clinical lesson plan. Doing this, I have used some resources from Time for Kids and decided to share with everyone. TFK is a great instructional tech tool that can be used not only when teaching social studies, but any other subject as well. It has news articles that are age appropriate for elementary students, as well as videos, worksheets, and activities for students. Sometimes schools will have subscriptions to TFK which allows students to have a copy of articles, but there is also a lot of great content online for students, even without a subscription. Standard 2 says that teachers must embrace diversity in the school community and in the world. By providing news articles that are understandable for students, we are able to provide our students with global awareness. This is a way for us as teachers to use current events to teach our students about diversity and the different cultures and people in the world. In my future classroom, I hope that I am able to have a subscription to news sources such as this in order to better teach my students about current events and global awareness.