Celebration of Learning!

Our final group finished teaching, and they all did a really good job! Fireworks! However, this means that today is our last day of fieldwork which is bittersweet.  The fifth graders were a great class to teach and I think they all helped us to become better teachers.

During group four's lessons, they all seemed to know their content and spoke loud and clear for everyone to hear.  At this point in our time in the fifth grade classroom, the students were getting more comfortable with all of us being there.  Group four did seem to struggle with their classroom management.  The students were rowdy and were not engaging in the lessons that group four had planned for them which was unfortunate because they had really great ideas. Group four incorporated the iPads in their inquiry lesson and had the students researching different people.  I liked that each group had a different person to research and they got to present those people.  Most of the students did a great job presenting.  They seemed to enjoy what they did and they were proud of their work.  There were also some other students who were not taking their presentations as seriously, particularly during cooperative learning.  The final lesson group four taught was directly after spring break, and let's face it we were all still on spring break mode! However, it really showed for some of the students and they were laughing while presenting and fooling around with each other.  Group four did do a good job managing their time and they were very organized which is a very important attribute to have if you are going to be a teacher. 

I commend group 4 for being able to not only squeeze their cooperative learning lesson in on our last day, but we also had time to have the students complete their post exams and give them their celebration of learning certificates! The students took their post-exam on the iPads and it was taken on google forms.  This was another way to have the students working on the iPads and it gives all of us a chance to see what the students learned. 

Teaching this fifth grade class was a great experience for many reasons.  It gave us a chance to collaborate with our colleagues and plan lessons, it gave us more time in front of a whole class before we student teach, it taught us organization, management, and a real experience with real students. Also, the material we taught is going to be on their final exam so, what we were teaching the students needed to be taught to them really well.

I am going to miss going to fieldwork and seeing the students.  Now, it is time to go back to class and continue learning how to be a great Social Studies teacher!