Describe your most meaningful accomplishment in the classroom that positively impacted your students. What key strategies contributed to your success?
It is part of an assignment for class. I am going to write about a lesson I created while student teaching. The children were absolutely in love with this project and every day they came to class excited to work on their project and even excited to find out about what their homework assignment was going to be. I just believe that when children are engaged the learning is effective. The children went above and beyond with this project which was an accomplishment for me. I was just curious to hear what others might say.
So I just tried something new in second grade based on a game a friend does with her family during the Olympics. During the Winter Olympics, I picked the top 6 teams from the 2010 Games (I have 6 "pods" of students). Each group picked from a hat one of the teams. They then researched the flag and made flags that we attached onto their desks. We then watched DVDs and read about each country as a social studies lesson, discussing what is the same about the US and the country being studied each day. Then we did a medal count every couple of days during math time....and recorded how many gold, silver and bronze medals each team had won. Gold got 3 stars, silver 2 stars and bronze 1 star (introduction to arrays and multiplication--a cc standard at second grade). At the conclusion of the Olympics, we first multiplied and counted stars and then created a tally mark chart for each country medal count. We then turned the tally mark into a bar graph (both CC math standards) as a way to organize information. The winning team (Team Russia) got to choose a $5.00 book from Scholastic Books which we presented in a "formal" ceremony to the music of the Olympic games It was sooooo fun!!! I had parents telling me that kids were tuning into the Olympics every night to see how their team was doing.... Anyways, I thought it was very hands on and real-life applicable to the CC Math standards.
I doubt my most meaningful accomplishment was an academic lesson. (Not that there would be something wrong with that.)
Mine is when my students created a comic book. I was teaching them adjectives and they had to create their own superhero. At first I thought it was going to be a regular arts and craft, drawing/colouring activity, but I was surprised that they put so much effort into it. Their drawings were amazing, story itself was funny and the superheroes they created were great. In the end the parents loved it because I explained to them how creative their children can be and if put to use to full potential, something this great can happen. It's always great to see what children can think of and put it on paper. Since this assignment was a huge success, I would always make reference to their superheroes in future assignments. I would tell them to write short stories, have them do presentations and more.
