Week 5

I really like the way that tonight’s class gave me the opportunity to learn about applying social studies instruction in the classroom as well as giving me a chance to learn new historical information. I really enjoyed the progression of the Harriet Tubman activities and the resources that it provided. I think that it demonstrated a clear lesson on biographies that I will be able to refer to as a model for our lesson plan 1. The “tea party” was an active and engaging way for students to compile new information and to communicate and interact with other peers. I think another good name for this activity could be “Sentence Storyteller’s” 🙂 Learning about sorts in other courses, I have always felt that sorts were particularly boring. In this case, I thought that the sort demonstrated an important and significant full-circle activity for attention/hook, accessing prior knowledge, and for use of closure. Using this in my classroom, I would like students to use a visual notebook during the hook (post sort), to ask students to generate a few sentences about what they think the lesson will be about and what they hope to learn. After the closure sort, I would ask that students go back to their notebooks to write down 2 things that they learned and 1 thing that surprised them. I really enjoyed viewing the lesson video from start to finish. We have been on many classroom observations in this course but it is not always true that you will observe something of significance or strategies that you can connect to your own classroom. To watch a lesson unfold in a well-generated and thoughtful way, helped me to connect our class activities and discussion. For our own exit strategy, I liked that we were given a sort. I think that it reinforced our lessons strategies but incorporated a variety of content areas across instruction, content, standards, and front-loading. Thank you so much for this clear and transparent definition. It is often a term used in our coursework that I hadn’t been able to quite grasp until this evening.