Day 23: White House

October 22, 2015

Today I taught the second lesson in my American Symbols unit. We learned about the White House. I was very pleased with how everything went. The students were very engaged in the virtual tour we did. On the virtual tour the students looked at a colorful blueprint of the house and they each got to choose 3 rooms to explore as a whole class. It was interesting/surprising to see which rooms some students were interested in. For example, on the final floor of the tour there was one student left to pick his final room to visit. Some of the rooms left were the Music Room, the Workout Room, various bedrooms and the last room that student wanted to view was the Storage area. Out of all the rooms the class got to view there was one room that they were disappointed they couldn't get a look at; a White House bathroom. To conclude the section of the lesson using the SmartBoard, we used Google to look at what a White House bathroom looks like. When the class was done we completed White House graphic organizers as a class (see pictures below). As I was teaching I made some changes from my original lesson plan. For example, I originally allowed more time to work on the graphic organizers so that there would be time for the students to draw pictures to accompany the text on their graphic organizers. However, after seeing how engaged they were during the virtual tour I decided it was more beneficial to spend more time on that. Overall, I was pleased with how the lesson went. One suggestion I had from my co-op after my first lesson was to allow more "wait time/think time" for the students after asking a question. This was something I tried to be conscious of during this lesson.

We continued to practice our This is a Moose play. We set a final performance date of one week from today, October 29th. Letters are going to be sent home to the parents to invite them to come in, and the elementary grade classrooms are also invited to attend next week. We began practicing on the stage in the cafeteria. The students seemed to really enjoy this change of scenery and in my opinion they put more "life" into their lines and acting.

Next week we should finally have a full class. This has not happened in over 2 weeks due to illness and extended excused absences (I will discuss this in more detail in my next post).