Striving Towards Competency

 This week I began working on my 5-Day Unit Plan and for my 7th-grade class, we will be covering Ancient Egypt and the Nile Valley Kingdoms. I'm still unsure about what activities I want my students to do but I have a few ideas such as decoding hieroglyphs or having students build a pyramid. I have 2 major goals with the activities I want to cover the first goal is to keep the students engaged I want the activities in class to keep students focused and interested in the topic at hand and so far with my field experience, 7th-graders don't sit still for very long. My second goal with my activities is to have the students take away a lesson or knowledge from the activity, for example, the pyramid activity will be focused more towards bonding with the students rather than teaching them but also having them work in groups is nearly always a positive as it helps students socialize and feel a little more energetic. 

 This week in class we talked about Ted-ED Lessons which have caught my eye. I really like how useful these kinds of lessons can be because of how flexible and simple they are as they can potentially be used as a bell ringer assignment or a larger assignment. I plan on implementing either Ted-ED lessons or some adjacent form of activity as I see it could be very useful for my classroom and help me quickly relay and test students' knowledge on a given subject. I plan on using an activity like this as a means of better understanding my students and what they understand about what is being discussed in the classroom so I can then better prepare the next lesson or provide extra attention to a student if needed. I believe this would work for my class best as a bellringer to keep an updated tab on each student from day to day. 

 This week was a bit easier and was a nice break from the stress of classes thanks to Fall Break and returning to classes on campus for Practicum. This has also given me time to reflect a little more on my experience in the field. I realize now that teaching or at least being in the role of an educator is more stressful than I originally anticipated as controlling a room of 7th graders is much easier said than done. This has also given me an idea of what areas of my teaching and strategies I need to put more effort into with my biggest weakness being classroom management and making sure students are able to hear and understand me speaking clearly. 

This week my partner and I had our own lessons for the first time ever. Overall I felt we did really well we both had a few small issues. My partner explained that he noticed I had two primary issues with my lesson those being that I wasn't speaking loud enough when I was explaining some content as well as looking a little too nervous which are easily fixed issues that I want to focus on in the second block of practicum. Mrs. Fox graded my performance while teaching and it seems she had similar criticisms as my partner but she explained that I lacked in the area of creating analogies or connecting the course content to concepts that would be easier for students to understand. I believe that is an area I really need to focus on as I am not used to speaking to middle schoolers and I shouldn't expect students to have the same level of understanding of these concepts. 

This week I spoke with my mentor teacher about planning my first lesson. Now I was a little worried about planning a lesson myself because I was unsure about how much content I will be able to cover in a class period while also giving students time to get their classwork done. Mrs. Fox offered to let me take over her lesson for the day since she already had the lesson mapped out and explained just how much each class period will be able to cover so I'm choosing to use her lesson plan for next week. But seeing how Mrs. Fox plans her lessons really interests me because it sounds very similar to how I would want my class to be planned that being on the fly so to say. Mrs. Fox plans her lessons in a way that tackles a particular task each day and does not require a fully mapped-out lesson plan.