Hay Bales and Teacher Tales

The three readings we had this week really stuck with me. They were filled with many facts I had heard before about teaching but went in depth and provided factual proof to stand behind them. I liked that these readings were laid out in list forms. A lot of these facts would be very beneficial to post around a classroom. Either as personal reminders or to show the kids that you do what you do to benefit them. The first reading I completed was, The Basic Teacher. This opened my eyes largely on just how much the first day matters. I have heard that you want to set up boundaries on the first day but the first impression is so much more. I thought largely about just how the room is set up and decorated could play a major role on first day. This can effective a mindset just as much as the teacher's attitude can. We should all be thriving to be impactful teachers. The second reading focused largely on decisions of teachers. On average, everyday, people make thousands of decisions...

The first week of our senior year of college and we definitely started out with a bang! We jumped right into the swing of teaching our first mini lessons. We had 15 minutes to teach our group a short lesson on our assigned objectives. My objective for the group was to have them be able to identify the parts of a medieval castle and answer a few basic questions about them. For this lesson, I really wanted to avoid using a power point. I think power points can be boring for students. After teaching this lesson though, I realized some lessons would actually be taught more effectively with a power point. I received a good amount of peer feed back on how having the slides posted largely on a board would of helped them retain the information better. They said it would of been helpful to be able to visualize each part of the castle. I started this lesson by asking my "students" to brainstorm as many parts of a castle as they could. Then, we moved to an activity where they had ...