This is the final blog I am sad to say, but it was a great semester with great experiences! Today at field experience, it was rough not only because of the classroom, but because of the weather too. It was freezing out! Aside from that, our teacher showed us a couple of tips and tricks of the trade while the students were in specials. She had this great reading activities book where the bookmarks were actual quick lessons that could be used as meaningful time fillers and she also showed us a social studies lesson that she was going to present later on in the day. The great thing about the social studies lesson was that it was literature based. The students were to read a book based on the time when Indiana was first being settled. Based off of this book, the students were to make an oral presentation about what the book was about, as well as write as if they were founding their own settlement. They were to think about the types of things they needed to survive, what kind of buildings they lived in, and what kind of people would live there. It was a really neat activity and lesson for the students for sure!
Later on in the class, the students were holding their very first book club where they talked about the first few chapters of the book they read. I had the opportunity to facilitate the ladies who were reading "Misty of Chincoteague". We talked about what questions they had so far, and then we went around and read our favorite passages that we found. After that, we made inferences of what we thought might happen based off of what we had read. Their homework for the next day was to write three paragraphs: the first was a summary of what they read so far, the second was a description of the characters (horses), and the last paragraph was just about discussion questions that each student would like to bring to book club the next time. The one problem I had with this was that although I do agree that all of the students should be on the same pace, they didn't seem that challenged by the amount that they were reading. It seemed like they were bored by the pace they were taking, so if it were me, I would have had them read more each night.
