Vicki’s Edu260 Weblog

This week I taught my Wooster History Unit for the 4 days of field. Overall it went very well, with only a few minor snags here and there.

On Monday I introduced the students back to social studies by having them look up vocab words from the dicitonary. After looking them up, we discussed them and why they are important in history. We also went over dictionary techniques like if there is more than one definition, which one pertains to history more. After vocab, we read a story from their social studies book, Aurora Means Down which talked about a family that moved to Aurora, Ohio for cheap land. We then discussed why people moved and how this is important to our history.

On Tuesday, I did a lesson on time lines. To start, we looked at the page in their book about how to read time lines and answered the questions about them. After doing this, I gave them a worksheet on answering questions about a different time line about Arizona’s history. Then I gave them a time line with events in Wooster and Wayne county and they had to put them in order. This is where it started to get a bit hairy, the time line was just 1800———————————–1900 with no in between markings, and the students became very confused by this. So I went over with them and then Ms. Dillon explained it even further to divide it up into 1825, 1850, and 1875. I did not even think about doing this because this was a worksheet they had used in the past and I just assumed that it would be ok, but I learned differently for this lesson.

On Wednesday, I presented the main section of my unit, the power point on The History of Ohio, Wayne County, and Wooster. I did not want the students to get bored with packets, so I decdieded this might be a more interesting way, since they don’t see a lot of this kind of technology. The one thing I did that Elaine pointed out was don’t ask “is everyone done”, but make it more fun and not as pointed by saying “When everyone is done, put your finger on your nose” or something along those lines for after the students were done filling in the blanks. The students really seemed to learn information about the history and really liked the power point, at least from their reaction to it being over was disappointment.

Thursday was review and test day. What I did for review though was had the students look at their packets for a few minutes, then gave each of them a card with answer and had them ask each other questions about what we had learned in the last few days. This way they got to do the interacting, but weren’t put on the spot having to answer a question in front of the whole class. Then after that they took their tests on this unit, which 5 students did not finish their tests in the time allowed, so I’m anxious to see how they did, but I haven’t yet graded them and will sometime before Monday.

Overall, it was a great week and I really learned a lot from my unit topic and from the ways of teaching 3rd graders.