Making Discoveries! Groups 1 and 2

INQUIRY AND BEYOND!

I have gained already a lot of knowledge within this type of lesson, and I never realized that students can benefit from inquiry lessons within social studies just like in science. By now I have gained a lot of knowledge about my students, who is going to answer questions, who needs extra help and who is going to fool around. This is knowledge I gained from just one lesson prior with them. I can not wait to have my own class so I can develop an even deeper understanding of my students and a greater relationship with them. From this lesson I learned that students are able to apply the knowledge they have learned to the task at hand. They are excited and ready to learn which is a great feeling for my as a teacher. 

This lesson, was very successful, the students understood the task and were able to go about creating their own newspaper. I feel the activity was very motivating and engaging for students. They understood what the treasure hunt was and how they would use the hints to fill out their newspaper. While walking around the room I though i was going to have to help them come up with answers and formulate an understanding, but infact the opposite happened. Before I could even ask a prompting question, they had the answer. This was great to see, it was exciting for me because I knew that something I had helped come up with was being successfully used to develop even greater understanding. I felt as though the pre assessment was great to refresh the students on what we learned, and the modeling was done in a way that students were drawn in to watch and they understood what their task was going to be. 

The part of this lesson that needs to be readjusted was the fact that we ran out of time.We spent too much time reviewing and pre assessing that there was not ample time to finish the activity at hand. Students were rushed to create and develop their newspapers and unfortunately we did not have the time to present our findings. This is something we must take into consideration and adjust for next time. I feel as though if we had another 15 minutes the students would have been able to successfully complete the task and present their findings. 

I learned a lot doing this particular lesson, I learned that there are already soo many great ideas out there that are available to us as new teachers and we truly need to take advantage of them. The strategies that are used have been proven to get students attention and engage them. STudents can gain knowledge from these activities and they can have fun while doing it. I learned the power of t he treasure hunt activity, I saw how the students were highly engaged and they were understanding how the hints correlated to the concepts. Seeing that they were able to make the connections, and make inferences is a higher order of thinking that I want my students to do. 

Watching the other lesson, I got some new ideas for my own class. Creating a broadcast system. This is using social studies to its fullest potential. I feel as though the students were excited to do this activity, and the directions were clear enough for them to understand what the task was. Gina did a great job modeling what she expected from them, using a relevant story that they have all heard before. She assessed their prior knowledge and successfully prepared them for the activity at hand.

The text really dives into inquiry lessons and what you need to teach them. This really helped me develop this lesson, first you really want to identify key skills that the students will develop, then understanding that they will be gathering information on an unspecified body of information. This took place as the hints, they were to make there own connections using the hints. They were given information to process and asked to discover or infer about the hints provided. Many of the data gathering skills were used, having the students question, interpret, observe, and hypothesize. They were then asked to organize the data in the newspaper, classifying the information. They had to find relationships, predict, make conclusions, which are all apart of data processing. Then lastly they were asked to communicate this information by writing it in the newspaper and then (If we had time) presenting the information to the class.