School Long Ago

In November, we started our social studies unit on life long ago. I taught a lesson on school long ago. I looked at our social studies book and it had two pages of information on school long ago. It was 3 paragraphs and I knew these first graders were capable of more than that. I kept the lesson objective the same as textbook, "Compare and contrast your school to one of long ago." I did research on Google and created my own PowerPoint. The PowerPoint was 20 slides long and covered Hornbooks, Dunce caps, quill pens, one room school houses, child responsibilities, subjects taught and more.

Here is one what my mentor teacher wrote about my lesson, "Ms. S taught a lesson in social studies about history. Our unit is comparing life long ago to now. She compared what school was like long ago to school now. She created a wonderful PowerPoint presentation complete with excellent photographs and visuals so students could compare and contrast school long ago to now. She also created an assessment where students had to write a sentence or two about school long ago and had to cut and paste pictures from school long ago into a school house. Both the PowerPoint presentation and assessment will be ones that I use in the future. They were so appropriate and engaging. After grading the assessment, we could truly see which students met the standard and which will need some re-teaching."

This is usually a lesson my mentor teacher skips so I was pretty excited when she asked if she could keep and use my PowerPoint and activity for the future. Below are some student examples of the assessment I created:

Date a Girl Who Teaches

I read a blog post called, "Don't Date a Girl Who Teaches." It had some really great points. I would have to say my favorite was, "She will bring home every strain of every airborne disease within a 25-mile radius. Hope your immune system's perfect." 

This blog post was written in reply to this blog post. Date a Girl Who Teaches was just as cute. I nodded my way through the entire article. As a future teacher who has over 300 children's lit books I especially enjoyed reading, "Date a girl who teaches children. Date a girl who enjoys more in a bookstore for school supplies and children’s books rather than in make-up store. She has problems with storage space because she has too many trinkets and storybooks to keep. Date a girl who has a list of stories that she wants to have and read, who has a collection of Aklat Adarna, Leo Lionni and Eric Carle’s books." I also really enjoyed this bullet point, "A girl who teaches won’t require much of your time. She will hardly see you on weeknights because she prefers to finish her lesson plans and worksheets and catch up sleep. Unless she had a really bad and long day, she will randomly ask you to have dinner or coffee with her. But if you insist, she will try her best and make it to the last full show of Inception even on a freakin’ Wednesday night just to be with you. (Please cooperate and pretend with her that she enjoyed the movie by not asking details of the show anymore.)" 

If you are a teacher or you are a future educator take ten minutes and read both of these blog posts. You won't regret it.