Teaching an Inquiry Lesson

      For the second day of teaching, I had to teach and inquiry lesson. This was a big challegI e to me because I had very little experience with inquiry lessons and never planned one let alone taught one. I was very overwhelmed when I began to plan. I had to no idea where I should start. Dr. Smirnova provided me with some good resources that would help me plan. After doing some looking on my own I decided to go with a web quest inquiry lesson. I looked around for some web quests that had some good information for students. I choose one ,but a lot of the information wasn't too great So i decided to use that web quest as a starting point and ended up finding additional materials on my own. 
     When the day came to implement my inquiry lesson I was still very nervous. Since I didn't have much experience with inquiry lessons a lot of this was new to me. I did my best to prep and make sure that I was comfortable as possible with the material I was teaching. After doing this lesson, i think there were a few things that could do to make the lesson better. I think that this activity really needed to be done in the computer so that the students could explore through website instead of just reading printed out articles. One other thing I would do is to spend more time helping the students create a hypothesis. I feel that they stuggled with this and it had an impact on the rest of the activity. 

First Day of Teaching

       Leading up to my first day of teaching I had a mix of emotions. I was excited, but I was also very nervous. I was so nervous because I had never taught in front of a whole class before and did not know what to expect. I was also very nervous because I was the first person in my class to teach and I would also be doing this on my own. At first I was not too happy about this, but I quickly realized that this was a great opportunity and experience. Teaching on my own meant that I would be pushed out of my comfort zone, something now that I am very grateful for. In just three short days of teaching my confidence increased and I felt so much more at ease and comfortable.

         Before teaching I was more concerned with actually teaching than the planning aspect. But once I began to plan, I realized that this was the most time consuming and stressful part. I never realized the time and effort that was put into planning one lesson. There are so many things to think about and plan for. Luckily, I was not completely on my own. There were many great resources available to me like the unit plans. It was really helpful to see how other teacher candidates planned their lessons and get some tips and ideas. Dr. Smirnova was also extremely helpful which really made me feel more comfortable with the lesson plan. Another important thing that i learned was how important it is to practice what you are going to the teach. I practice multiply times and I felt this really helped me to feel more comfortable.

What teachers should take into consideration when

lesson planning !

Helpful planning wheel to take into consideration !

What is social studies ???

What is social studies ? 
       This was a question that was asked to myself and my classmates during beginning of the semester. I though I had a pretty good understanding of what it was, but I was wrong. There are so many different areas that make up social studies. When I first heard this question, I immediately thought of history. I had a very basic understanding of what social studies was. 
      During the first week of class we were given the task to read the article What is Social Studies ?, this was a very helpful and eyeopening into what social studies is. The article says social studies is about integrating many different fields like, history, math ,geography, sociology, religion, and political science. It is important to know all the different fields involved in social studies. The goal of social studies is to promote civic competence.The promotion of civic competence cannot be done without the integration of all these different fields. 
           As a teacher it is important to know how all these different fields make up social studies. It is not beneficial to your students to have a black and white outlook on social studies. As teachers we are responsible for educating and shaping young children and this cannot be done if we a fully aware of the material we teaching or what is expected from us. If a teacher just teaches history in Social Studies, there students will suffer. Being lectured about the history will not make them better citizens,let alone better students. It is essential as a teachers to create not just good students academically, but also good good students of the world.

What is social studies ??