Journal entry 1/8/09

Last semester I had the opportunity to go to Westside Elementary School in Springville, Utah for my 3 week field experience. This was an amazing learning experience. Terry Whitby was my partner. We team prepared the lessons and taught most of them together. A teaching experience I had there was when I taught the class a lesson on Mexico. I had the students get into groups of four and learn about different aspects of the Mexican culture such as: Food, dress, climate, flag, government, etc. After they because "experts" on there specific subject I jigsawed them so they could be in different groups to do a brochure. After they made their brochures they presented them to the class. The Mexico brochures they did turned out amazing and this project taught them so much about culture. I loved teaching them about this subject and it was very beneficial for me to evaluate what they learned. At the beginning of the lesson they couldn't tell me what culture meant. By the end of the lesson they had so many ideas and answers on the meaning of culture. Being in their school taught me a lot. I was able to see what I needed to improve on as a teacher. Some of the things I discovered/learned about myself are: I say "k" after directions I give. I need to make sure I recognize the time while teaching because I went over sometimes. This was great for me to have this learning experience because I benefited from it extremely.