Thankful for a Terrific Mentor Teacher

     This week was spirit week at the school.  Tuesday was celebrity and cartoon character day.  The students and staff had the opportunity to defy the dress code and be someone different for the day.  There was an anime character, a baseball player, a rapper, superheroes, and a Duck Dynasty reality show personality flocking our classroom.  I tried my best to dress up as a boy band singer that the girls in our class greatly admire.  I thought that the students would think it was funny- especially since I am a girl.  Our mentor teacher dressed up as a ninja turtle.  The kids went crazy with excitement over her costume.  Not just the kids in our classroom, but several of the kids at the school.  I just wanted to take the time this week in this post to recognizer her too.  She is not afraid to act silly or dress up if it makes the kids happy.  She is also a great teacher.  She is a real inspiration of how a teacher should be.  She creates a comfortable and fun environment in her classroom and loves her students.  It amazes me how much respect she is given from the students and the staff.  I hope to not be afraid to get into character and participate in fun events, like spirit week, at my future school.  I hope that I gain at least half of the amount of respect and admiration that my mentor teacher has earned.  I can see the impact that my mentor teacher has on the lives of the students that she teaches and passes in the hall each day, as well as the people that she works with.  I hope to be able to do the same when I officially become an educator.      

Florida History Lesson and Playwriting

     In our classroom this week, my co-teaching partner and I taught our first of three social studies Pathwise lessons for our fourth graders.  In our lessons, we are focusing on the people and important events that occurred during the time that Florida was a territory of the United States as well as when it became the twenty-seventh state of the U.S.
     For our first lesson, we had the students pre-read chapter five section one of their social studies textbooks.  The following day we presented a PowerPoint lesson for the students that directly dealt with the information that they had read.  We presented the information in a timeline format and included better visuals of maps and people discussed during the time period.  Each slide of the PowerPoint had a timeline at the top with the years 1821-1824.  We bolded and colored in green the year that we were specifically talking about on that slide.  Underneath the timeline, we listed important facts from the section in their textbook.
     After, reviewing the information with the students, we told them that we were going to put them into groups in which they would need to write a script for a play together about an event that we talked about in the PowerPoint and that they read about.  Then, we asked them what a play was and what needs to be included in a script in order to act it out.  After this discussion, we showed them an example of script found in the fifth grade reading text book and split them into groups.  There are three groups.  One group will be acting out what occurred when President James Monroe appointed General Andrew Jackson to set up Florida's government when it became a territory of the United States.  General Jackson only stayed in Florida for three months, then went back to Tennessee with his wife.  This leads to our second play.  Our second play is about President Monroe appointing the first non-military governor of Florida, William Pope DuVal.  The students will also be acting out an important meeting that took place between DuVal and the Seminole Indians known in history as the Treaty of Moultrie Creek.  Signing this treaty caused the Native Americans to give up many millions of acres of their land for incoming settlers and be forced to relocate to a small reservation in the middle of Florida.  Our last group will be acting out the time when Governor DuVal appointed two men to find a capital location of Florida.  The twist to this event in history is that the location that they found was a Seminole Indian Village...
     The students began writing their scripts after we divided them into groups.  We assigned characters, but gave each group the option to pick which members in their groups would act out each part.  We specified that if there was any fighting over parts though, that we would draw their names to choose who was which character.  There was a minor conflict in one of the groups, but the boys played rock, paper, scissors to decide who would play the character they each wanted.  This solved their issue.  The majority of the groups are very excited about writing their plays and are coming up with great ideas, remembering to include accurate information, and working well together.  One group with the only girl in the class is having difficulty though.  The boys in the group are not including her ideas or taking her input into account well.  I talked with them before the day was over about the importance of everyone in the group participating.  Fingers crossed everyone will work well together when we finish the plays and act them out next week.  Several of them even want to make props and dress up for their skits.  I am happy that we were able to create an engaging history lesson that will hopefully help them remember the information in addition to having fun.                  

Acting and Assessment

     Two weeks ago, the fourth graders in our class took the Florida Writes Test.  My co-teaching partner and I oversaw a reading lesson in which the fifth graders read and acted out a play from their reading textbooks while their fourth grade classmates were completing their test.  The play that the students acted out was an African story about a fisherman that tricked other salespeople from the market into giving him baskets and other merchandise.  He told them that a bridge that they needed to walk across to get to the market would break unless they lightened their loads that they were taking to the market.  He told them this lie because he could not find any fish to sell at the market in order to earn money to buy the goods.  The other salespeople ended up finding out that the bridge was not fragile and they played a similar trick on him in order to get back at him.  Overall, the students did a GREAT job acting out the story.  Most of them were very into character, read well, and used props found in the room.  Also, the fourth graders in our class completed their writing test and fingers crossed they did great too!