Student Teaching-- Week 3

WHAT?!?!?!?!? It doesn't seem like it's only been three weeks. In some ways it seems like I have been doing this A LOT longer than 3 weeks and in some ways I'm thinking "where in the world did the time go???". It has been a great experience and I am sooo excited to get in to my own classroom and get this started!!

Right now, we are in the middle of our Texas Indian Unit and the students are having a BLAST (well.. most of them). This is the first research project the students have ever done, and to be honest some of them are blowing me away with their work ethic and determination and creativity. I put the students in pairs and gave each pair a tribe to research (when they heard they were going to research, they were NOT excited). They had to find 10 characteristics (that blew them away), what environment their tribe lived in, how they used their environment, their social envrionment (chief, interaction with other tribes), and interesting facts. Then they had to take ALL of that information and put it in to a PowerPoint presentation. I had to teach them how to use PowerPoint and they caught on REALLY QUICK. My mentor teacher and I were BOTH super impressed with how quickly the students got it. After the PowerPoint, the students had to make a book with all of their information. In their book they had to put the info from their PowerPoint and draw pictures to go with their pages. This was really fun for some students in the class because there are some pretty talented artists in our class. Tomorrow we are going to start our dioramas of the envrionment. These kids have never seen or heard of a diorama before so they are in for a REAL treat!

Overall, I'm having a BLAST. I start Kindergarten in 6 weeks and I hope it's as fun as 4th grade!