During my second field placement in a grade 1 classroom, I created a You and Your World lesson about healthy eating by creating an international fruit salad with the students.
For this lesson students were divided into small groups and given fruit in a bag and card with information about where the fruit was from, how it grows, an interesting fact and how you eat it. Groups then presented the fruit that they learned about to the class. After learning about the different fruits, we cut everything up and enjoyed a fruit salad.
This was a great lesson that integrated You and Your World with Language Arts. The students completely engaged in their learning; they all went home that day asking their parents to buy some of the exotic fruits that we tried in class today. Furthermore, students gained awareness about the different climate that is needed for different fruits to grow and how far they travel to get to Fredericton; there was a lot of learning happening during this less.
In collaboration with Sarah Palmer, Alice MacKay and Sara Facey, I created a grade 4 Social Studies lesson plan as part of the Exploration unit. This lesson incorporates the creative teaching strategy "Pocket Full of History" to engage students in the lesson. The lesson plan can be found by clicking the link below.
As part of Methods in Elementary Social Studies I created an Ancient Societies WebQuest with Alice MacKay, Jason King and Sarah Galvin. This webquest was created for grade 5 students based on the NB Curriculum Outcomes. One of the strengths of a project such as it allows students to work independently and be in control of their own learning. This webquest not only allow students to learn in depth about an ancient society, but it also builds on their technology skills, their ability to work in groups and it is cross-curricular as a portion of this project requires students to complete a written portion.
Please visit the following website to view our webquest in depth- everything the teacher and students need to complete this quest is available: www.ancientsocietieswebquest.weebly.com and the password is culture.
Teaching Strategies and Methods
This Personal Reflective Journal I created during my Methods in Elementary Social Studies is an extremely valuable resource that includes numerous teaching strategies and methods. Compiling these teaching strategies and methods