Intern Experience Week #9

This past week the majority of my teaching and content focus was on the Underground Railroad. I introduced the material using a section of the book and then had my students work through an interactive website from scholastic.com. The site was introduced to me by my mentor teacher because he has used it in the past with his students. The site was great it offered a variety of visual aids like photos and slides shows for students to gather information to answer each of the 4 sections questions. The site also in each section had students listen to the experience of a run away slave named Walter and his experience traveling on the Underground Railroad that was related to the information students were learning through the site. After the students were done going over each section by listening to the material and looking at the pictures they used the information to answer reading questions and then took those reading questions and formed informational sentences. They would then use the informational sentences to create a paragraph and picture in order to create a Underground Railroad information book.
Overall the students did really well with the activities. I had planned for them to do each section on their own using the laptop lab but the computer gave more trouble so we ended up having to go through the sections as a large class and discuss the answers for each questions together. It was nice because I knew they had no excuse to not have the correct information for their writing. I then had the students create and illustration to go along with their writing. The students also received a large piece of paper that they folded in half to create a cover and binding for their 4 different Underground Railroad information pages.
Then on Friday we went on a class field trip to Phillipi because it is the site of the first land battle in the Civil War. It was very interesting for me because I am not from West Virginia and it was cool to see the town and different important sites. I also had no idea how close it was to the community that my PDS is located in. The students did a walking tour or the town and sites and then we went to and old mansion and toured that. It was cool to be learning along side my students during the trip on Friday.