What I've learned 2013

I have learned a great deal again this year.  I always enjoy the content the most, but I really need to keep myself looking back at the Historical Thinking Skills and how I can teach these on a much smaller  scale to my kindergartners.  Like I shared with everyone, teaching kindergarten is always like teaching content that the students have never learned about before.  Getting them to think on a deeper level is the challenge, because they're just trying to wrap their little brains around what I'm even talking about.  My goal is to just keep plugging away at using what I have learned and to get my team on board also :)

2nd Writing Lesson

I decided that for my 2nd writing lesson, I would get together with my buddy teacher- Nancy Hayashi, and do the writing assignment with her students.  It just wasn't working trying to do it in my kindergarten class, and I really only had a one to two sentence sample to share.  It was good to get together and share the Historical Methods article, and show her the writing rubrics.  We talked about some ideas, but we didn't officially decide on the prompt or the writing method we would use.  I even offered to come in the afternoons a couple of times to work together with her and her students.  I'm sure that we will come to a decision soon, and I will update you when we get started.

Reflection Wordle

The words that stand out show that the students were reflective in their writing about the social studies content.  It was really fun to think of all the ways we could incorporate a wordle in our classrooms too. 

Historical Method- Tier 1

I enjoyed reading The Historical Method- Building student understanding of the past.  I often relate what I'm learning now as an adult, to the way I learned in school as a child.  Unfortunately, what we usually remember is the bad parts.  I think of my 6th grade teacher who was retiring at the end of the year that I had him.  He literally would turn his hearing aid off in class and go about his business, while we raised heck.  Every day we would take out our spiral notebook for Social Studies and our Social Studies book and copy word for word, page by page.  That was how we were supposed to learn.  We were just expected to absorb it.  It was like this for every subject of the day too.  I don't remember anything from that year. 
I think that it has helped me to become the teacher that I am now though.  I am, as a learner, gaining a better, broader view of history.  I think my difficulties lie in establishing a time sequence of where everything fits.  I have strived to do an engaging way of teaching this, while incorporating personal connections to the past.  I have also learned from my colleagues, Robin and Nancy, how to bring in primary source documents and evaluate different perspectives in them.  All in all, I think that the article is great to keep as a refresher.  It encourages me to think outside the box, and to challenge myself to always do better.  And hopefully, I will never be remembered as I remember my 6th grade teacher Mr. Bain.

My Lesson Plan Idea

My focus is going to be on Pocahontas.

Our character trait for November is Friendship and Loyalty. This will work perfectly, and she will then become my "hero" for that month.

Remember now that I'm in kindergarten,so start thinking very simple or basic. One of my SS standards is to know the triumphs in American legends and historical accounts through stories such as Pocahontas. This will fit in nicely with how people lived and worked long ago.

As far as writing goes, my standard is for students to use letters and phonetically spelled words to write about experiences, stories, people, objects, or events. This again will fit in perfectly with Pocahontas.

My last thought is that I'm going to make a GLAD style big book to use as the literature piece. I don't want to have anything cartoonish, and I think primary sources would probably be too advanced.

I have enjoyed this process so far, and have appreciated the feedback from my group. We'll see how it goes :)

Summer Institute 2011

This summer's workshop was amazing and fun!  I enjoyed the historical content from Sharon Sundue.  I always like to learn new things to add to my teaching.  Some of the stories she told were very interesting and at times funny.  My absolute favorite was the American Heroes piece.  I found this very motivation and applicable.  Since I am returning to kindergarten, a lot of the content I won't be able to use.  But, the hero’s piece I can. I have proudly made my 1st heroes poster on Thomas Alva Edison to go with our monthly character trait- Hard work.  I look forward to continuing the journey through this History Grant and am thankful for all I've learned so far.

Reflection

Well, like Adina said, we fear reflection.  I am just excited and a little overwhelmed at all the information that we have learned.  I am one of those that just needs for everything to sink in, and then I can start invisioning on how I'm going to incorporate what I have learned into my classroom.  I do look forward to the endless possibilites though :)