Katelyn's journey of teaching Science to digital learners

We reached the finish line  Thought this semester I learned many different things and strategies that will help me in my future teaching career. I learned how to ways on how to best teach a direct and an inquiry lesson. This class also helped me grow both professionally and personally. I grew professionally because instead of just observing how a teacher teaches in a classroom and writing what they do down I was the teacher. I got to teach my students two vastly different lesson plans on the same topic. But at the same time being "the teacher" equals many different responsibilities. As the teacher, you need to come up with ways to adapt your lesson so all of your students benefit from it. These students can range from children who may find the lesson easier than most to children who find a lesson extremely challenging and need extensive amounts of help. You also need to make sure that there are enough copies of the day's activities for your students and extra for the s...

Earth science or the atmosphere project  I Really loved the earth science lessons we did this week. I always had a hard time with earth science in high school and middle school. But the atmosphere project I was assigned to do made me realize how fun earth science could be. At the start of the week we had to read chapters 10,11 and 12 of the textbook Teaching children science: A discovery approach written by Donald DeRosa in order to familiarize ourselves with the content. The second thing required of us was that we had to do the engaging part of the lesson. This part included filling out a questionnaire on topics that we thought we could teach extremely well to children, fairly well but having to study for an hour in order to teach it, having to study for more than one hour to teach it or not being able to teach it at all. When going over the questionnaire I had the most trouble with questions involving the atmosphere. One the questionnaire was finished we then were put into gr...

Chapter 3  After reading chapter three of the textbook  Teaching children science: A discovery approach written by Donald DeRosa I was extremely surprised at how important "discovery" could be to a science classroom.  The textbook states that " discovery is used as a way to engage students in the scientific process instead of them having to learn science second hand. By having students actively participate in the lesson they are able to gain a deeper understanding of what they are learning. The textbook also states that "Discovery suggest that we need to respect and value the learners their role in developing understanding" If we learned for our students we would not be doing our jobs as teachers. As teachers we should allow our students to make trial and error, we should allow them to make mistakes and get messy, we should also allow them to make their own discoveries because if a child discovers something without a teachers help he will be amazed at wha...

The edTPA and task When reading the edTPA handbook, I was extremely overwhelmed and very confused. Since I am only a sophomore, I never heard of the edTPA. At first, it was information overload. After reading the handbook a few more times, however, I was able to understand the text and its usefulness. 

 Fieldwork guidelines When reading the fieldwork guidelines, it all seemed familiar to what I had been instructed to do when teaching at Bishop Dunn, a Catholic school with high standards. As teachers, there is a certain level of professionalism we have follow, which includes looking like a professional. Looking like a professional includes covering tattoos and wearing business attire, such as button-up shirts and dress pants. I believe that when you dress the part you gain more respect from colleagues and students. I felt the first day of field work was extremely informative. Using the “get to know you” activity enabled me to more easily get know my students. The results of the pre-test were what I expected. The students knew some, but not a lot, of information about plant classification

 The difference between a unit plan and a lesson plan. The terms “lesson plan” and “unit plan” are often used interchangeably by teachers, but they are actually quite different. A lesson plan contains only one lesson, while a unit plan can contain up to five different lesson plans on one topic. Also coming up with a unit plan can be more challenging than coming up with one lesson plan. For a unit plan, you need to make sure each lesson follows the one that came before it.