The Grand Finale

This course has given me so much in such a short amount of time. I will take the lessons and knowledge of science from this course and apply it to my own teaching of science in the future. I learned so many skills in this class like how to use a SmartBoard and how to create my own Prezi. I have learned that it is crucial as a teacher to pre-assess at the beginning of a lesson or unit, assess while doing the lesson, and assess once the lesson or unit is done.Or Diagnostic, Formative, and Summative assessment. It is important that we as teachers engage our students in the lessons that we lead them through. 


My knowledge of science has been contributed too by various activities that we have completed this semester. I will such activities like Jigsaw, Science Circus, Balloon Activity, and Float and Sink in my classroom when I am a teacher because these activities helped me to learn about science in a hands-on way. These activities just reignited the passion and zeal that I have for science, and I look forward to creating more science lessons for my students in the future. I really enjoyed reading our textbook  Science Stories, by Janice Koch. I have learned so much through this book especially from the different Science Stories in each of the chapters. I want to integrate the science stories into my classroom when talking about the different units of science and make them my own. My favorite science story was An Edible Solar System in which Mr. Johnston and his students created the planets using different fruits and vegetables, using a pumpkin as the sun!

The most memorable class projects for me were the Science Circus, Balloon Activity, and Jigsaw Activity. My favorite activity was the Science Circus, in which each group created an activity related to either earth science, physical science, or life science. Our group had physical science and so we created an activity exploring the property of gravity. What made it really fun was that we got to go around to the other teams lessons and test them out for ourselves. My favorite station was the one where we had to create the phases of the moon with marshmallows. It was really fun because no one in my group besides myself and Kira liked marshmallows, so we got to eat the marshmallows into the appropriate shapes.

In reality every single aspect of this course has helped me to grow as student and as a professional. I learned how to create a collage of lessons into a science circus, and how  to write objectives for my lessons. I learned how to engage students in an activity and learned that it is important to make the activities something that the kids can relate to and enjoy. I learned how to assess my future students and  how to become more comfortable in teaching science and understanding science through this class. I have learned how to write an inquiry based lesson plan, and how to reflect on myself and how I can become a better teacher.

It was great to be in a school environment, I believe that it is one of the most important experiences a pre-service teacher should have. It was a great opportunity to really see how a lesson is implemented, and how the planned matches up to the reality. Seeing my lesson work out wonderfully did wonders for my self confidence as a future teacher. I give major credit to the students of Ms. Benfers class. I never had an entire gaggle of older females intrude into one of my classrooms and attempt to teach me anything. They took it with stride, however and made the experience truly memorable. We were able to watch Ms. Benfer, and other groups present their lessons, all of which included inquiry. Everyone did wonderfully, the followed the steps of an inquiry lesson, engaged the students in the lesson and responded to any questions that they may have had at the end. 

The e-folio presentations were wonderful. Everyone had a page or two that they were very proud to show, and even though no one had their completely finished, it was obvious that when they finally are they will be a concrete sample of how far they have come during this semester. I really enjoyed the efolios that used the animations, and the ones that used pictures to show and represent their page. I really enjoy perusing through all of them, and I hope that my efolio is as esteemed in their eyes and theirs is in mine. 

This final project is definitely different then taking a final test in the fact that it is a much better way to see whether or not we understood the material and have grown from it. It is a collection of all the work that we have done, showing our mastery of all the skills and lessons we have learned. This project gave us the room to do what we wanted with it, making each one unique. It took a lot of time and effort to finish it, but I am really proud of the end result and I feel that it has helped me to grow as a professional.

I have learned so much about myself through this course. I  learned that blogging is a way of communicating with peers and colleagues and that it is also a means of self reflection. I have  learned that the journey towards improving myself and becoming a better teacher is a never ending process. I have learned to gracefully receive constructive criticism and using this feedback from my teachers and classmates in my assignments to better my future work and presentations. I have learned that we can learn a lot from listening to what others have to say, but that we can also learn just as much from looking into ourself and back at what we've done and seeing room for improvement. Both of these methods together have allowed me to become a reflective thinker in a community of learners, and I look forward to continuing my journey towards becoming a teacher.

Peanut Butter Fun Facts

At dinner tonight we had apple slices with our meal. I love having apples with peanut butter so I went to go get it off the shelf. Sugar Free Peanut Butter. I didn't know peanut butter had sugar in it to begin with. So I bring it to the table and open it up, and on top of the peanut butter is a pool of oil.  My brothers freaked out because they've never had natural peanut butter before so they thought the peanut butter had gone bad. I explained to my brothers that it was just oil from the peanut butter and that it was alright. Stirring it up I put some on each of their apples, faces looking skeptical, but both still deemed it edible after the first bite and put peanut butter on the rest of their slices. 


Here's an article about natural peanut butter that I thought was very informative and sarcastically witty.
All Natural Peanut Butter: A Survivor's Guide


This is a photo of the peanut butter before being stirred:

A Forest of Flora

When I arrived home I was pleasantly surprised by the many different types of flowers blossoming around my house and neighborhood. I love taking picture, so I thought I'd share these pieces of beauty with you. From my teacher perspective, I would love to be able to take children outside of the classroom to explore and take pictures as I have done today, it was really enjoyable and I ended up learning a lot about the different types of flowers, trees, and other plants around me.

Recommending Myself?

Writing a letter of recommendation was harder than I thought it would be. Looking back at all the work I did in this course made it difficult to choose the best highlighting points of my accomplishments. It was hard for me to find the right words to express my worth, and I still don't think it's ready to be sent out to future employers just yet. I still need to put a lot of work into finding the right balance of self appraisal such that future employers know my worth, but that I don't sound too haughty of myself. I do believe, however, that my thoughts as to how our professor sees me. I believe that she would be very proud of me and my work and how far I have come in her class.

Science and Technology

I had always thought that it was important to be technologically savvy, seeing as how most of our daily life is submerged in technology or the products of technology. I never realized, however, how many tools are out there on the internet for free. I have learned to use a wide variety of presentation tools, as well as how to find relavent and credible material to use while conducting research. I've also learned how to sort through most of the information out on the web, and find what I'm looking for in less time than it would have taken me before this class. Some of the technologies that I learned about were the Smartboard, in which I have taken a 3 hour class learning how to operate one counting towards my professional development. During the class we created activities using the Smartboard, and presented our work to the class. It's important to know how to navigate a Smartboard because more and more classrooms are being installed with them. They are a great tool and resource and thanks to this class I feel fully capable of using one to it's maximum potential in my classroom. I also learned about Google Docs and how it is a wonderful tool when you have to work collaboratively but schedules don't match up. I now use Google Docs for many of my assignments, because instead of being saved to the computer it is saved in the 'cloud' on the internet, therefore I can access my work at any computer with internet access. I also learned how to use presentation tools such as Prezi, and art tools like Queeky. The amount that I have learned from this class is staggering, and I still look forward to learning more and imporving my knowledge of the available technologies that many don't know about. Learning about all this technology has helped me to become more prepared in teaching my students about technology. It's important that I impart to my students how important and useful technology is, but that it is also continuously growing and that we can never stop learning more about it. I now feel confident that I will be able to give my students the necessary tools and lessons to become successful when they finish their schooling.

Reflecting on Reflection

I have learned so much about myself, the process of reflection, the role of feedback in teaching and communicating with peers and colleagues, student motivation, engagement, and how they all tie together. Throughout this class, I learned more about myself as a scientist, student, and teacher. As a scientist I learned that I enjoy exploring different possibilities and creating experiments to test my hypotheses. I grew as a student because I learned so much about the world around me, and also what's beyond just what's around me. As a teacher I was able to implement an inquiry based lesson successfully and learn from it what I should do differently next time. The process of reflection is constant. I am always wondering, "well how will this effect me, or those around me." I also think about what I can do to better myself, how I can improve my work, or what I can do differently for the next time. It's a long and time consuming process. Keeping a blog was probably the hardest thing to do for me in this class. I'm not in the habit of writing in a journal, and I had never had to keep a blog before. I honestly didn't like writing about every single little thing that happened, I believe that that took away from the independence a blog should have. If I could do it differently I would have like to keep a picture journal of my journey throughout this class, as I love to take pictures of my surroundings, or things that find interesting. Seeing a picture for me brings back more memories and thoughts then a passage about what I did in class that day does. The role of feedback in teaching is crucial. Without feedback, we don't know whether the lesson was successful or not, or whether the students really took anything meaningful from it. Feedback is how we improve our lessons and how we gear the curriculum more specifically towards our students. Communicating with our peers and colleagues enables us to go beyond what we can do on our own. Collaboration is necessary towards giving students a meaningful education. Feedback also helps us to motivate our students. By knowing that most of the boys like learning about bugs, or the weather, we can tie certain lessons into that topic. Feedback helps us learn about our students such that we can make the material more personable for them, allowing them to get excited about the material and eager to learn more. This task helped me to meet many of the INTASC and ACEI standards. Below are the exact standards I have met through my reflective practice.

Assessment.. Hooray!

Throughout this class I have learned so much about the different ways in which we assess students, and what sort of assessment we should be using. What I knew coming into this class was mostly about Traditional Assessment testing and quizzes and forms that aren't necessarily applicable to a situation. With these types of assessment children are thinking, but they are not necessarily using the higher order of thinking, in which they have to create, evaluate, and analyse situations. I have learned that Authentic assessment is the best way to make sure that we are molding our students into productive citizens. I now know about diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment, and examples of each such that I may implement them in my future classroom. The numerous ways that children can be assessed during these times covers multiple ways of representing information, and fits all different styles of teaching. Below are the standards that I have met as a future professional and that have helped my development throughout the semester.

What's this about Blogging?

Keeping a blog throughout this semester was probably one of the hardest tasks to accomplish for me. I'm not in the habit of writing something down almost every day like I have in this blog. It reminds me of keeping a diary, of which I could never do growing up or this very day. I was, however, already used to observing my surroundings and making observations about nature. Feedback in teaching is crucial for a successful classroom. There must be feedback from the students whether or not something is or isn't working, feedback from the parents regarding the work their children have to do, feedback from other teachers on where they are in the curriculum and how we can help to improve each others' lessons, and feedback from yourself. Questioning whether or not the lesson worked out as planned, why and why not, and what can be changed to make it a better lesson next time are all very important reflecting tools. Having students keep a science blog, however, can motivate them to explore more and to research what they are really interested in such that they can share with their classmates via their blogged what they've learned, or what they're interested in. Keeping a blog is a very useful that students can use to further their understanding of science and initiate them, if they haven't already been, into the technological community.

Writing my Educational Philosophy

This is probably one of the most important assignments that I have completed this year. I put a lot of thought into this statement, making it a statement that I would still agree with and support when I become a teacher. This is the type of classroom I want to have. I want students to not want to go home at the end of the day because they want to learn more about themselves, their peers, and the world around them. I want them to come in to the class in the morning ready and eager to learn, just as I will be. I want to leave a positive lasting impression on my students, as well as the school I work in. In the future I will be able to look back at this philosophy statement and realize how far I have come as an individual and as a teacher. I hope that in the future I will still have this want and need to give students the best possible opportunities to learn and the lifelong reasoning and application skills as possible. I want to see my students in the future as successful and happy individuals and have my own happiness in knowing that I was a small step in helping them get there.

My Educational Philosophy Statement

     I truly believe and know for a fact that the children in our classrooms are our future. They will be the ones to explore and discover the world after we have; to find the things we overlooked and to invent the things we couldn’t dream of. I want them to provide for them the knowledge and skills to be able to explore their world to the best of their ability. I believe each and every child has the potential to bring something unique and special to the classroom and to the world. I will strive to help children develop their potential by believing in them as capable individuals and by creating for them a community of learners as well as a safe learning environment. I will assist children in discovering who they are, so they can express their own opinions and nurture their own ideas. I have a mission to make the world a place where people learn to respect, accept, and embrace the differences between us and help one another to keep progressing.

     Every classroom presents a unique community of learners that varies not only in abilities, but also in learning styles. My role as a teacher is to give children the tools with which to build upon and evaluate their knowledge. To accomplish this goal, I will teach to the needs of each child so that all learners can feel capable and successful. I will present curriculum that involves the interests of the children and makes learning relevant to life. I will incorporate themes, integrated units, projects, group work, individual work, and hands-on learning in order to make children active learners. Finally, I will tie learning into the world community to help children become caring and active members of society.

     My classroom will be a caring and safe environment where each child will have the room to grow into a member of society. I will allow children to become responsible members of our classroom community by using strategies such as class meetings, positive discipline, and democratic principles. In showing children how to become responsible for themselves as well as their own learning, I will give them the tools to become successful in life, to believe in each other, and to believe in their own abilities and potential.

     Teaching is a lifelong learning process of learning about new philosophies and new strategies, learning from the parents and community, learning from colleagues, and especially learning from the children. Children have taught me to open my mind to all of the things that can be, and to reach out and strive for those things.  I want them to never lose this train of thought, that anything is accomplishable if they put the work and effort into making it possible.

Models Я Us

Certain things can only be explored through models. For example, if I were teaching my class about the digestive system I would not ask for a volunteer so that we can open them up and learn 'hands on'. Instead, I would have the students explore a medical model of the digestive system,  or manipulate a 3d virtual model on the computer. Lessons should always be paired with a visual model or presentation for the children. Often these models or presentations are the only way in which the students makes a connection to the material they are learning and what it actually means. If children are assigned to make a model, they often go out of their way to learn more about their specific project. In order to make a model, you have to know what part goes where, and often that leads students to ask the question, "why does it go there?" Thus making models is a great way to spur creative thinking and have students explore on their own.