I was impressed by the visual presentations. Everyone was creative and there were some fantastic ideas. Even with just listening to the summaries, I learned new things, such as the information about the Statue of Liberty. It was great to see the various applications that people used in their presentations. I am interested in incorporating them into future lesson plans. It was definitely an idea gathering presentation time. I think that working on the project with Tonya was also very valuable. This assignment lent itself better to creating a cooperative lesson plan than the George Washington lesson plan did. Tonya and I have been writing lesson plans for 3 semesters and I think we both have ingrained methods. It was a good learning experience to understand why she did things a specific way. I believe we melded our techniques well. I’m not sure how it could be done, but I think cooperative lesson planning should be experienced earlier on in our education. For me, that would have been in the science class. It might also be interesting to do one in each class. It would have exposed me to new ideas and methods and would have made me more confident in my lesson planning abilities.
I began this class with reservations, having not had great experiences in my past with social studies. My eyes were opened to all of the possibilities of what social studies can be. I value all of the activities we did and the resources we learned about. I will definitely be a better teacher for taking social studies. I hope to make my students’ experiences more engaging and memorable than mine. Thank you for taking the time to help me expand my knowledge and become more comfortable with the topics I will eventually teach.