My Final Methods Course

Today is the day I had my FINAL methods course at my school! Where has the time gone? I have learned so much and gained so much knowledge on everything in regards to teaching. The next step...STUDENT TEACHING! I am extremely nervous about it, but I know that it will be a rewarding experience for me. I have gained so much knowledge that I will be able to bring to the classroom I am placed in. Not only will I use the ideas that I have learned, but I will reference back to strategies and activities my own professors used with me to help enhance my own knowledge. There were many methods classes that I took, but the one that I will focus on is the LAST one I will ever take, which is Science and Technology Methods for Childhood Education!

Dr. Smirnova has taught me all I needed to know when it comes to teaching science, especially using technology. The biggest takeaway from this course was when I created and implemented my unit plan on Weather and Water with my fieldwork group members. The process was stressful because we had to create an entire unit plan in under a week, but with the limited time we did have, it went extremely well! This course has definitely taught me about time management. I now know how to create a lesson plan under pressure!! Working with my group members was amazing because we all worked so well together. We created an awesome unit plan that the students really seemed to enjoy! We related the material to real life experiences, especially through our Inquiry lesson. We were introduced to using Web Quests in the classroom, which made us extremely eager to include that in our own unit plan. I loved using this tool because it was unfamiliar to me, yet it was extremely effective! Another interesting tool that we used in the classroom was ThingLink. I have used this website before to create a digital me presentation, but not in the same way we used it for this course. For Science Methods, we created a 360 degree interactive lesson about the sensory garden at Bishop Dunn! A 360 degree image of the sensory garden was provided and we have to create a 5E Inquiry lesson to put into the ThingLink. This was such a creative idea that I would have never thought was possible. Even though the lesson wasn't actually going to be given to real students, it was a great experience! Learning about new tools in the classroom really made become more aware of what technology is out there! Technology is definitely my biggest takeaway from this specific methods course. Science is definitely not my strongest subject, but there are so many interesting and creative ways to teach this subject. 

This course really made me reflect on my own teaching. This was my 2nd time teaching a unit plan to a REAL group of students! This time around I could tell that I was much more comfortable, especially with my great group members! There's definitely a lot I need to work on in order to feel 100% confident in my teaching, but I know that I'm in the right direction! I accomplished a lot within this class and displayed it all on my electronic portfolio. Check out my e-folio at this link! 

Now that it's the last day.....LET'S CELEBRATE!!