The British Are Coming, The British Are Coming!!!

Today was the BIG day! It was finally time for my group to teach during fieldwork. I was a little nervous, but getting to go third allowed us the time to really get to know the students before planning our three lessons. This was extremely helpful because it allowed us to make any accommodations and modifications needed to ensure that each student has an equal opportunity to learn. It was also convenient that the subject we were teaching was Social Studies because I am perusing a degree in History. This took away some of the stress for my first full class lesson because I felt very knowledgeable with the content that we needed to teach. Another aspect that helped me feel more comfortable was the fact that I am a camp counselor. I am used to working with large groups of children in a way where I have to demonstrate strong enthusiasm for a subject, exhibit good managing behavior skills, and keep children engaged for a long period of time. 

Our three lessons circles around a chapter that discussed the thirteen colonies establishing themselves as an independent nation. We began with our Direct Lesson, which really focused in on key concepts and vocabulary words of the chapter. Before presenting our Prezi, Ms. Patricia, Ms. Jean, Ms. Julia, and I activated our students prior knowledge by reviewing the previous chapters on Native Americans and Pilgrims.

Because Direct Lessons can be rather dry, we decided to make the Prezi more interactive and engaging by adding a Voki. Our Voki was Patrick Henry, who was a colonist during this time period.

"Hello, my name is Patrick Henry. I moved from Britain to Virginia, one of the thirteen colonies. I moved to Virginia in hopes that one day I would gain my religious freedom. However, when I got to Virginia I realized that we were still under British control"

"Finally the thirteen colonies came together in order to defeat the British. How were they able to do this you ask...Well........"

 :

While presenting, we made sure to have the students repeat all of the important terms as a full class. During one of my slides, I even had students stand up and pretend to be Paul Revere. They all galloped and yelled, "The British are coming, the British are coming!" This was something that I decided to do right on the spot and I do not regret it for a minute. The students responded to this in a very positive way, and I do not think that they will ever forget who Paul Revere is now. 

   

After every couple of slides, we decided to make the lesson even more interactive by using the SmartBoard. Ms. Jean created a True/False activity where students had to come up to the board to place a statement in the True or False swirl. If the student got the True/ False right, the statement would swirl into the choice that was chosen and disappear. If the student got it wrong, the SmartBoard would tell them to try again. We did this two times during our presentation and there were five questions each time. After a student answered, we would ask them to tell us why it was true or false in order to get the correct information across to all of the students. 

SmartBoard True/False Activity

 (Created by Ms. Jean)

After completing the Prezi, we gave the students an Independent Practice crossword puzzle activity that went over the key terms and ideas that the students had just learned about in our lesson. Being that they were only in second grade, we decided to give them a word bank in order to help them with spelling these words. We then went over the activity as a class, where I would say the clue aloud and the entire class would respond with the answer. The activity showed us that the students really seemed to understand and remember almost all of the information that we taught. They were very engaged during this activity, and it was quite clear that our lesson went pretty well. 

Cross Word Puzzle Activity 

(Created by me)

Sample of a student's work

(With two minutes left to complete the activity) 

We then closed our lesson by doing a quick review and assigning a reading comprehension passage with questions on Paul Revere. Overall, I was so proud of the way that our lesson turned out. The students were very enthusiastic about learning and I think that we presented the material very clearly. Though it was a Direct lesson, we were really able to make the content engaging for the students. We did slip up by saying "guys" and "gonna" a couple of times, but we did fantastic for our first time teaching. *FIREWORKS FOR US*