Community Outreach

In order to fulfill a community outreach requirement for my Education 260 class, I participated in the NAEYC Week of the Young Child that took place at the OARDC in Wooster.

At this event I was able to walk around the area and experience the activities that were set up by the area preschools. I think that this experience was great because I was able to observe, and even participate in, many different activities that I could incorporate into the classroom. I was able to see children painting with household items, experiencing several different sensory activities with bowls of grains and beans, and blowing bubbles, to name a few. I think that the two most interesting experiences I had were when I was able to touch and play with “fake snow” and when I was able to look through a fun recipe book. The fake snow was used in a sensory table much like sand, but was a lot easier to clean up. This white stuff actually felt like the real thing, it was amazing and the kids seemed to love it. The recipe book contained pictures and recipes so that parents or teachers could make “fun” snacks for their children. There were all kinds of ways that people had thought to manipulate food in order to makes faces or animal bodies. I hope that I will be able to find a book like this again and use some of the ideas it presented.

The other half of this experience involved me sitting at an area where children came up us and experimented with playing musical instruments. I think that this was a lot of fun because in addition to the individualized time I was spending with children, I was also able to meet and interact with several parents. Overall, I think this was a very worthwhile experience.

I believe that experiences such as these allow teachers, parents, students, and community members to engage in meaningful interactions. While the students may not necessarily gain anything from visiting this type of site for an hour, I believe the connections that are made between the other constituencies present will be able to carry over for weeks and years in the future.

Week 8

I find it hard to believe that my field experience is over. The weather this week was again nice and we spent a lot of time outdoors. The children seemed to again to enjoy their time outside running and playing.
Within the classroom, I wrapped up my experience with a small group lesson on outer space. They had been learning about different planets everyday, and I helped expand their knowledge of the planet Mercury. I worked with about one or two children at a time. During this lesson, we covered a small circle with glue and sprinkled dust onto this tiny planet. We discussed the “warm” and “cold” sides of the planet and how these temperatures vary with night and day. We also talked about how the planet has craters, much like the moon, and is covered in dust. In addition to learning about Mercury, we made a space scene where we used vocabulary words, such as rocket ship and astronaut. We added these pictures to our dark sky and were able to add stars of different colors, such as red, blue, brown, yellow, and white. We also reviewed which start were “warm” and which were “cold.” I think that this lesson went well and the children seemed to enjoy it. The children did a very good job remembering the differences between the stars.

Field: 7 hours
Support: 1 hour

SMARTboard lesson

Sara Warden and I partnered to teach a lesson on the Digestive System using the SMART interactive whiteboard.

Digestive System Lesson Plan

The Digestive System

Professional Organization Search and Review

Professional Organization Search and Review

This paper is a review of 3 professional organization’s websites.

The organizations I reviewed were:

• The Association for Science Teacher Education

  • http://theaste.org/

• National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

  • http://www.nctm.org/

• The Ohio Council for the Social Studies

  • http://www.ocss.org/