Exploring the World of Social Studies with Danielle

  As this semester finally comes to a close, I can now say that I feel extremely relieved. This semester challenged me beyond my limits with the workload and amount of time I have invested. However, I have learned so much about myself and  my journey toward becoming a future teacher! The fieldwork for this class provided me so much useful information that I will remember for when I have my own classroom one day. I am very thankful that my group and I were able to teach all 3 lessons: a direct, inquiry and cooperative. The 4th grade students were amazing as well and they taught me a lot about what it takes to be a teacher: PATIENCE! It was an amazing and valuable learning experience that I will forever cherish.  This semester has also taught me so much about what Social Studies is and how to teach it. Before this class, I had little to no clue what the methods to teach Social Studies were. Now, I can say that I am confident in my abilities to teach Social Studies as I have...

Engage: I have never seen the painting pictured above before now. Although I do not how whose paintings these are and the history of them, I can guess that they represent important people throughout history. I believe that the first painting is a man standing in a court room standing up for something he believes in while the people around him stare in awe. I think that the second one is some sort of religious representation as the lady with white hair is holding her hands together in a praying position with her eyes closed and the lady next to her is holding a rosary. The third picture looks like a family that is about to eat dinner while the mother/cook serves the food on the table. The last painting I believe is a mother and father tucking their child into bed. I am sure that all of these paintings have some sort of important historical significance and I would love to learn more about them. Explore: Making History Alive Using technology in the classroom can make lessons mor...

Engage: Skype in the classroom creates global citizens Skype is a great source of technology for students to use in the classroom. Skype essentially allows you to "travel" the world all at the click of a button. For example, someone in New York can talk to someone all the way on the other side of the world with this technology. It allows for live learning that a textbook or newspaper article cannot offer. I believe that this specific form of technology would be very useful for teaching economics in a Social Studies classroom. This is because in class the teacher could have a guest speaker come to class via Skype. They could invite expert speakers who are knowledgable on economics from anywhere in the world. This would be extremely useful for students because they would be able to learn from a different viewpoint and they would be engaged as well as excited. The technology of Skype also allows students to make connections with those outside of their own natural comfort zone, w...

Engage: What qualities make you unique? What qualities make other people unique? I have many different qualities that make me unique and so does everyone else in the world! However, the ones that make me unique include my personality, my experiences, my goals, my passions, my attitude and my perspectives. The qualities that make other people unique include all of the same things that make me unique, just in a different way. Being unique is something extremely important in life. If we were all the same everything would be boring and repetitive. Being unique means being unlike anyone else, and in order to develop the qualities of being unique we must start by being our authentic selves. It also helps to broaden your horizons by trying out new and interesting things. Some new and interesting things to try out could include becoming a painter, creating a blog, keeping a sketchbook or playing an instrument. These are just some ideas and there are a lot more that can lead to finding your own...

War and Peace  Why is Russia invading Ukraine? On February 24th, 2022, Russian troops launched an attack on Ukraine that started with explosions before dawn in the capital Kyiv and other cities. According to Ukraine's foreign ministry, Russia's intent was to destroy the entire state of Ukraine. At least 40 people had been killed in what is being called a "full-scale war." Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, warned other countries that if they tried to interfere it would lead to consequences that we have never seen before. As of now, Ukrainian leaders are mobilizing 36,000 reservists as it prepares for a full invasion.  Why exactly is Russia invading Ukraine?   There are many reasons for the invasion according to different sources. According to Putin, the main goal of the attack is to defend the Russian-speakers of Ukraine, especially those who live in the two self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which left Ukrainian control in 2014. Now, NATO (North A...

 Fieldwork Group 1: The Globetrotters   Miss Maria, Miss Danielle, Miss Mary, Miss Kayla, & Miss Allison It's the beginning of fieldwork and I can't wait! Today, all 5 groups were able to introduce ourselves and play unique icebreaker games with the 4th grade students to get to know them better. After all, it is extremely important to get to know your students before teaching them! All of the students seemed to have a fun time playing each group's game and it was great to interact with them for the very first time.  For my group, we created a game where a wheel was spun with each 4th grader's name on it. Whichever name it landed on was the one who answered the question at that time. After a name was chosen, a question was chosen after. Some of the questions that were asked were: - Sweet or Salty? - Do you have any siblings? - Dogs or Cats? My group did not have enough time to let every student answer a question due to timing, which made some students upset, but the ...

World Geography Treasure Hunt   For this assignment I was responsible for using the World Atlas to search the answers to questions regarding our world. Some of the questions included: 1. What is the current population? (7.9 billion) 2. What is the largest and smallest country? (Russia & Vatican City) 4. What is the oldest and youngest country? (Iran & South Sudan) After completing the questions about our world, I was surprised at how little information I knew! I knew very few answers to the questions that were asked. Therefore, I made a lot of knew discoveries. One of the discoveries that I found to be most surprising was for question #10: What is the most popular native language? The answer is Chinese and there are 1.3 billion speakers! This answer blew me away. At first, I guessed English, but English is not even #2. It is #3 with a whopping 370 million speakers. After I answered all the questions about our world, I had to answer some questions about my world. Some of the...

  HUG THE EARTH Walking along feeling free  Feeling the Earth here with me  And I love her. She loves me  I hug the Earth, the Earth hugs me.  She's our friend,  We'd like to be together forever.  The Earth is our garden  It's a beautiful place  For all living creatures  For all the human race,  Helping Mother Earth  We can peacefully roam,  We all deserve a place  We can call our home.  Food is a treasure from soil and the sea.  Clean fresh air from the plants and the trees  The warmth of the sun giving life each day  Turns water into rain, it’s nature's way.  And I would like to thank you, Mother Earth,  I like to see you dressed in green and blue   I want to be by you. Lorraine Bayes My Thoughts:  I really enjoyed reading this poem and it was very heartfelt to me. It made me realize just how important the Earth is. We must take care of the Earth and make sure that n...

  My Mid-Semester Journey For the Midterm Bingo Project, I decided to use the digital resource Canva. I have used Canva in the past and I am very comfortable with it. It is a great resource to use in the classroom as well because there are so many different things you can incorporate into it. For example, in my presentation I utilized the video feature that is embedded within Canva to record myself talking about everything I learned thus far in the semester in my social Social Studies Methods class.  While I was creating this presentation, I touches upon various topics that we have learned and explored. By doing this, I realized that I have learned a lot! I was also able to refresh my memory while creating this presentation because I had to look back through the textbook and multiple resources located on eclass.  I truly enjoyed creating my Midterm Bingo Project because it allowed me to be creative and include everything I wanted to. It also pushed me outside of my comfor...

Hello everyone and welcome back! For this week's Social Studies Methods class we were required to read chapters 1, 2 and 3 from our textbook. I gained a lot of new knowledge and insights from reading these three chapters and want to share them with you all! First and foremost, what is and why teach Social Studies? What can make the concepts of Social Studies "alive" and interesting for students? (chapter 1)      1. Social Studies is defined as an integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civil competence.      2. Teaching Social Studies is super important. This is because it can help students to retain as well as gain knowledge about the world around them. Social Studies content also allows students to learn how to explain relationships with other people and the environment. It also equips them with knowledge and understanding of the past.  Next, what made social studies the way it is from the historical perspective? (chapt...

For the Jigsaw Project, my group was assigned to make a Google Slides presentation on Individual Accountability. During this process, everyone was broken up into groups and assigned a certain element of the Social Interactive Model. Through this process, my group and I were able to delve deep into what Individual Accountability is and why it is so important. Once we were done creating a Google Slides presentation on Individual Accountability we had become experts on the topic and were responsible for teaching our base groups what we learned.   Now, you may be wondering about what exactly Individual Accountability is. Don't worry, I'm here to tell you!  Individual accountability is the belief that everyone will be accountable for his/her performance and learning.  Why is Individual Accountability so important? Individual Accountability is extremely important in the classroom because it motivates each group member to ac...

Bloom's Taxonomy is extremely important for all educators to know because it is a useful tool in the planning process.  It is defined as a set of models that are used to classify learning into different levels of complexity.  Bloom’s Taxonomy consists of three domains that reflect the types of learning we all do. Each domain has different levels of learning. They are put in order from the simplest to the most complex.  The three domains include: 1. The cognitive domain: thinking and experiencing 2. The affective domain: emotion and feeling 3. The psychomotor domain: practical and physical Bloom's Taxonomy also includes 6 different levels: 1. Creating   designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making 2. Evaluating checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring 3. Analyzing comparing, organizing, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating  4. Applying implementing...

Welcome back friends! Long time, no see. I have been extremely busy with all of my classes and school work -- specifically teaching at Bishop Dunn. However, my fieldwork experience with Group 1 has finally come to an end and I'm here to talk about it! It went by extremely fast and I wish I could have taught for longer. My group and I were responsible for teaching the 4th graders about Westward Expansion and why people moved west. We had the luxury of teaching 3 lessons in total; a direct lesson, an inquiry lesson and a cooperative lesson. Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3  I am very happy that my group and I got to teach all 3 lessons because the rest of the groups were not able to do that. It allowed me to fully understand and develop all of the different ways of teaching. From this experience, I learned a lot of new information about not only myself, but also students/their learning, planning/teaching and social studies learning/how to teach it. Below, I am going to ...