My Classroom & Reading Experiences

* For confidentiality purposes, a pseudonym will be provided for the observed student  and mentor teacher *      As the month of November was coming to a close, so was my field experience at Thurmont Middle School. My last visit of November took place on  Thursday, November 17th from 1:30-2:30PM in a 7th-grade social studies class , and it was undoubtedly one of my most memorable visits of the entire semester.      On this day, Ms. G planned one of the more creative and advanced activities I had seen up until this point. As mentioned in the previous post, students were studying African kingdoms, and in the days leading up to this lesson, students were learning about the gold and salt trade that took place between African kingdoms during the 7th-14th centuries. For this lesson, students would have the opportunity to be the tax collectors/merchants and pretend as if they were trading gold and salt. To set this activity up, Ms. G split the class into 5 groups with 4-5 students in each gro

* For confidentiality purposes, a pseudonym will be provided for the observed student  and mentor teacher *     Reflecting back on the final full month of my field experience at Thurmont Middle School, I can confidently say that the month of November was the most enriching in terms of the classroom experiences. Not only did I perform my first lesson plan for students, but I also had the opportunity to observe some interesting classroom behaviors. The observation I am going to describe took place  on Thursday, November 10th from 1:30-2:30PM in a 7th-grade social studies class.        On this day, students were tasked with completing a graphic organizer on the African kingdoms of Mali, Ghana, and Songhai. There were readings on Ducksters (https://www.ducksters.com/history/africa/) that students read which provided them the information needed to complete the graphic organizer. While nearly the entire class finished the assignment during class, there was one group of students that seemed t