The past few weeks the students have been collecting food, treats, toiletries and water for the Uplift Organization to hand out to the homeless. They start packing the donations into goody bags next week.
Tuesday, January 30th
Today was my first day in Mrs. Tapps’ class. I got to see how she structured the class’ morning and participate in the morning activities. Each morning they class comes in and puts their stuff away and does some kind of activity, today they wrote a letter to their star student. After about five or ten minutes the class got ready for their morning meeting through a greeting song that they taught me. The students found a partner to start off and then went through the actions that they were singing to teach them the correct ways to greet someone, through a handshake, fist bump or wave. When the song students sat down on the rug at the ground of the room and listened to the students who had the announcement and weather report jobs as well as the star student’s about me presentation.
I was really impressed by how respectful the students were to each other and how smoothly the transitions went between each task. Something that I saw today that I could take into the classroom in the future, if I go to elementary, is a call and answer prompt that gets the students’ attention and tells them to be quiet and ready to listen to the next instructions (Shave and a haircut - two bits).
Wednesday, January 31st
Today Mrs. Tapp introduced a new project to the class that combines reading and science as well as some creativity and computer skills. The students have to come up with, and create an app that will do something either to help someone or that is educational. They skyped with a person Mrs. Tapp knows from microsoft yesterday afternoon and asked him any questions that they had about the logistics of the project and today they watched a few videos of kid inventors who were on Ellen a few years back to get some ideas. I think this will be be really interesting project to help out with and I am really excited to see what they come up with. Hopefully there is someone at CAPS, in the teacher ed group or another strand, that has some experience making an app that I could pull into the classroom and have them help out one day. Or maybe later on after they have made their apps and need to try and ‘market’ them I could pull in a business student and he'll be them talk to the students about how to make a product marketable and get people interested in using it.
Friday, February 2nd
The second grades went on a field trip today to the Wilderness Science Center to learn about the water cycle. They left in the morning so I wasn’t on the classroom with the students for very long. While I was there I helped Mrs. Tapp edit the students videos about different ecosystems. For this project the students were put in groups and researched their ecosystem and made a model to show what they learned. After they finished the research they made two videos in a news report interview format where one student asked the other questions about the ecosystem and the animals that live there. The first video focuses mainly on explaining the diagram and the second talks about the animals. We used iMovie to combine the two videos together and add some background music. Then we put the full videos into an app called green screen to add a different background of their ecosystem into their video. This type of project is something that I would love to do in the future when I am a teacher because it helps to keep the students involved in the project and gives them another option of presenting that does not involve presenting directly in front of the class for students that are not fully comfortable standing in front of the class.