Intern Experience Week #11

Last week at my PDS was a very exciting and rewarding week of teaching. I taught a lot of lessons that went very well and the students seemed to be into them. We focused a lot on major battles and important people during the war. My students worked on computers one day researching an individual that they chose from a list provided. The had the choice of either Union, Confederate, or Civilian. I provided students with a guide to help aid in their research because with the information they found they were going to be creating a type of information card, modeled after a baseball card to represent their person. The card needed to include all of the information they needed to find from their guide, a picture and then either the confederate or union flag as the background behind their person. Over all the students did a really good job with this assignment, and it is always nice to use technology.
The following day I introduced a lesson where we explored important battles like Bull Run and Antietam. We read from the text, did reading questions and watched video clips to help aid students in comprehension. Once we did all of these instruction steps the students were then again given a guide for them to fill in information and they were to pick one of the two battles to create a battle summary. My mentor teacher also had a lot of Civil War books in his classroom so the students were able to use these as a resource to look at pictures which helped in the picture portion of the summary. I think the students liked it because they get interested into the bloody aspects of war, but they had a lot of trouble writing a summary. They have written summaries in other classes and I did explain it, but a lot of them just presented the information like a baseball card. It was frustrating because I know they just weren't listening. I am doing all of these different activities with them but they still seem to be bored with the content.
Finally on Thursday and Friday we spent two days using the book Pink and Say. The students loved it and were really into the story. One the first day we did a picture walk and discussed what they thought the book was going to be about and then I introduced them to important new vocabulary that we would come across in the book. Next we started to read the study and got about half way done on day one and then finished it on day two. As we read, a lot of discussion developed and the students had a lot of questions. When they found out it was a true story at the end of the book a lot of them were astonished and it prompted even more questions. I was very happy with the outcome of using this book and plan on using it in my own future classrooms.