Miss B's Learning Center

This was our last time going to Hudson and teaching the second graders about helping our planet. This lesson was dealing with integrating dance and movement into the lesson plan to get the students up and active. So many times now in schools, it's becoming more and more important to get students up and moving and engaged with various movement activities. We took this into our own hands and made sure we were planning a lesson with dance and still relating it to Earth Day! The we first read a book to the students: It's Earth Day! by Mercer Mayer . This book has a main character who learns about Earth Day in school, and wants to do something to save the polar bears. He starts by unplugging the computer and turning off the lights, then turns off the water when you aren't using it. He also plants trees and made signs to help make people more aware to reduce, reuse, and recycle. In the end, he finds that just by doing all of these things can help! Even if his climate control ma

The last week of tutoring at Cunningham went really well! We started by going through the writing assessment. We gave her a piece of handwriting paper and then had her write down any words that she knew how to spell. She started off pretty well with a good amount of words written down that she knew. There were a couple that were spelled wrong, but she kept going! We had to give her some ideas for words to spell out, some she knew and some she would just say "no.." if she wasn't sure how to spell it, and then keep writing.  The book we read was called ZooZical by Judy Sierra . Our student always likes to start reading a book by going on a picture walk first. She uses the pictures in the story to help her read, which is a great method to use! Every week we have a new book, she is able to use this as a way to get familiar with the story and then she's ready to read! This book was about animals at the zoo who are trying to find a way to get people to come back to the z

I have always known about Twitter and have had an account for a while, but when it got brought up to create a professional twitter page, I was not sure about how well it would really work out. I had created my professional page in the Fall of 2017 for an Education Technology class here at UNI, but had only used it a couple times, and maybe had a total of 8 followers. This changed once this semester started because I actually started needing to use my blog for field experiences, which led to connecting it to my Twitter to get my experiences out for others to read about. Twitter has been a big part in connecting with others and for my reflections for my field experience. It started when we had to participate in a Tweet Chat for my Literature class. This was the first time I had done that, but overall I thought it was a great experience! By using the hashtag #UNILitEd, I was able to connect with other UNI students, and in the end, am able to keep up with their progress in becoming futur

I went to the Leader in Me conference on Saturday April 7th. This conference lasted from 8am-12pm and had a lot of great information to go along with it. We started the conference in one of the bigger lecture halls in Schindler, with about 100 people at the conference. There were students from UNI, Wartburg, and a few from Hawkeye Community College along with elementary school students from St.Edwards Catholic School, Orchard Hill Elementary, and Lou Henry. They had students between the ages of 2nd grade and 5th grade represented from these three schools to give presentations about each of the 7 Habits. The 7 Habits are (1) Be Proactive, (2) Begin with the End in Mind, (3) Put First Things First, (4) Think Win-Win, (5) Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood, (6) Synergize, (7) Sharpen the Saw. These habits are things that are put in place to teach kids how to be in charge of their own learning. I think that these allow kids to take on a new form of leadership, and since

This week went started and ended really well! Our student was really excited to come read with us today and seemed very excited compared to the past few weeks. She had a sheet of paper in her hand and when we asked her what it was, she told us she wrote a poem about her bunny rabbit. When we asked her if we could hear it, she was more than glad to read it to us. It was really neat to see her get excited about it and want to show it off. Later on, she asked us to both read it again and then wanted us to take a picture of it. It was so cool to see her this excited and proud about something she did. We brought two books to read for this session. They were both in regards to animals, one sea life and one one safari life. She got to pick which one to read first and she seemed pretty eager to read them compared to weeks past. We started by letting her pick which book she wanted to read first. She chose the ocean book first, so we took turns reading each page. This method seems to

We just finished our second week teaching second graders at Hudson Elementary school. This weeks focus was to integrate drama into our lesson. We started off by reading a book about how to recycle and in this book, there was a lot of examples of household items we can recycle every day. Some of these included plastic bottles, newspaper, cardboard tubes, paper, and so many more. Next, we laid out a bunch of items that our group brought as examples of recyclable materials and things that we could use to make our puppets. We talked through each of the materials and what they could be reused as. We then introduced the reader's theater to the kids and told them we would be creating puppets to go with each of their characters they were assigned. The kids really liked being able to create their puppets out of the materials we had available to them like egg cartons, newspaper, pipe cleaners, cardboard boxes, tape, plastic bags, and lots of other stuff. Their puppets turned out really w

Today Brooke and I finished tutoring our student at Cunningham Elementary for the fourth week. This week went better than last week, and I think a lot of it had to deal with her now being used to both of us being there and working with her. Last week was the first time we were both tutoring her and I think now, the familiarity with both of us helped this tutoring session to go a lot smoother. We started with reading the book Animal Strike at the Zoo by Karma Wilson. Brooke asked her if she had read this book before, and she hadn't, so that was nice to be able to go through something she hadn't already read, because it helped her keep her attention towards the book better. We first walked through the front cover, and were looking at what a 'strike' meant. She seemed to understand this word and we talked about how it meant the animals were going to go on strike in this book. Since we have found that the best way to keep her attention while reading a book, and the way

Week three is complete! Today was a little different than the past two weeks because one of my classmates, Brooke, was co-teaching with me. We paired up, so now it is the two of us and our student for the remaining weeks. Our second grader was a little thrown off by this and we think it had to do with there being someone new there. It took us a little bit to get into the swing of things, but we ended up starting off with the concept of print book and going through that. This started out a little rough because she didn't want to go at the pace of how the text evaluation was supposed to be recorded. It took us a while to get on the same page and have her slow down to answer the questions we were asking about the text. Once she began to answer, we were able to get through the book with her answering all of the questions according to what we were asking. After the concept of print book, we moved onto introducing the book for the week about animals that we were going to read. W

Another opportunity to teach! New school, more second graders! This experience was one of three where myself and 4 others in my class will have the opportunity to go into Hudson Elementary school and teach a group of 8 second graders about helping the environment. We will be incorporating topics like visual arts, like we did this week, drama, and music along with various others. This is a great opportunity for the kids to learn in new ways and it gives them a chance to get into smaller groups and have a more one-on-one approach to learning. To begin, we introduced ourselves and all said something we like to do outside/ something we do that deals with the environment. This was our "get to know you" activity, and it allowed all of us to share something we do within the environment. Next, we read the book The Lorax by Dr.Seuss. This is a classic book by Dr. Seuss that has a lot to say about taking care of our environment. The second graders had watched the movie already, so

This was my second week tutoring my second grader at Cunningham School for Excellence. Overall it went very well! When I first got there on Thursday morning, my student was very excited to see me and to go out into the hallway to start reading. We talked for a little bit at first and she told me her birthday was coming up and how she was excited for it. It was good to see her more comfortable and talkative and she was asking questions about what book we were going to read next! To start, we went through the alphabet letters and my student was able to identify them all and the sounds that they make. This was very easy for her to go through but did help her identify the specific sound that belongs to each letter. I think this assessment was very good for her as an introduction activity/ warm up. We then looked at the next book we were going to read, being Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw. We began by taking a picture walk, which I think was a good start because she told me and described w