Who Will Win?

I don't think I have mentioned this before, but the librarian at my school is absolutely amazing! She has made the library one of the coolest places to be on our campus. She also just so happens to have been my 8th grade Pre AP Language Arts Teacher too. She was amazing then, and I am so grateful that she has made the library into a place where learning happens too. 

On my campus, we go to the library every 3 weeks. It just so happened that today was my library day (tomorrow is too) so I explained to her that I would love to do something that was election related while we were in there. Boy did she deliver! First we started with this amazing video that was done by the students at the Ron Clark Academy. My kids were very engaged with it! I love that it shared the views of both candidates and that it was not one sided.

After we watched the video, we discussed why it is is so important for individuals to express their right to vote and how it affects our country. The librarian set up a blog for us to respond on in class. My students answered questions like...

If 6th graders could vote, how would it change the campaigns of the candidates?

Should United States citizens be required to vote?

Do you think voting is important? Explain your choice. 

I was so amazed by some of their responses. I was not really sure how much background knowledge my students really had about the two candidates. I am glad that they proved me wrong. 

We finished the day with a mock election after students had some time to do their research about the candidates. I could not believe it! We had a dead tie of 45 votes each for the two candidates. I even got one write-in vote! I am interested to see how close my students are to the real election. 

Did you do anything fun for the election today?

Unit Plan and Smart Boards

Hi Again! 

It has been quite a while since I have blogged on here, but I have just been so busy between my classes, observations, volleyball, and subbing.

School is school and my education classes are really starting to wear me out. I am really beginning to feel that my Methods and Management and Curriculum and Instruction classes that I am in, are not actually very helpful. I think that I could be teaching the class right now. She also assigned us a ton of projects that I am not sure how beneficial they are really going to be to us in the long run. We have to complete a unit plan, which I think will actually be helpful because I plan on using mine when I am student teaching. Mine is going to be a social studies unit on Texas Civics and Government. I think it will be interesting and it is also nice because this is the first time in school that the kids have Texas History, so it will be new to them for the most part. Is there anyone who has some resources or great websites about that topic that I should look at? One useful thing I do think that has happened in those classes this semester is that we had a person come from the Smart Board company to come and show us how to use them correctly. I learned a lot of things about it that I had never done before. We also have Smart Board presentations coming up shortly and I have no idea what I want to do mine on. I am hoping to do one that I can also use for my unit plan.

I have been going to my mentor teacher's classroom once a week still and I just love it. The kids are so great and my mentor has really involved me in the lessons. Lately, she has been pulling me my own small group for the intervention time and she even let me teach the math lesson the other day. I'm really hoping that my experience in the spring goes as well as it is with my observations right now.