Field Week 2

This week was a bit more stressful. We were preparing our next two lessons and I came down with a horrible flu/cold. But despite all the stress of being sick and trying to ignore it our lessons were great! One thing that I did realize very quickly was that it was a lot more work to put our lesson plan into action for all 29 of our 5th graders than it was to just write the lessons. We decided that for our Guided Inquiry lesson we were going to have our students in pairs research a historical character from the Revolutionary War and present their character in a Wax Museum we would be doing at a later date. The idea itself seems awesome and simple but when it came down to it I realized that you can't just leave the research to the 5th graders they will need and outline, predetermined information and a pre-written biography to go off of. So I spent most of the week putting together information for biographies on 15 historical characters. It was a bit overwhelming but I sure did learn a lot!
We had our final evaluation on and Friday and from our first evaluation to this one I could really tell that we had come a long way and was pretty proud to show our evaluator how far we had come. The feedback that we were given this week was just to make sure we always have a game plan of what is suppose to happen, what should happen and what we can have the students do next. We found out in our lesson that some students finish much faster than other and we should always have the next transition set for those fast finishers. This was good for us to realize and prepare for. Overall, it was a pretty good week in the classroom. My partner and I have really learned a lot and are so grateful for the experience.