7th Grade

This semester I have spent my time observing Mrs. Slike a 7th grade child development and sewing teacher at Mechanicsburg Middle School. Mrs. Slike has a great relationship with all of her students and appears to use good classroom management skills. Next week the current students will be switching classrooms and moving to Tech Ed leaving Mrs. Slike with a new group of students until December. She will repeat her curriculum over and begin with child development and then finish with the students sewing project, constructing their own diper bag!!! Stay tuned for more exciting updates!!!!

6th Grade

6th grade
The classes that I observed is learning about their culture and heritage.
There are about 16 students in each class and about 7 different classes.

I will add more later :)

I have been working with the eighth grade teacher at MMS. Her content focus is on nutrition and budgeting. I am excited that I am able to teach nutrition, however, the budgeting aspect is not one of my favorites. Some of the information that she is going over is a review for me from when I sat in this class in eighth grade. I am looking at this as an opportunity to teach something that I would not choose to teach over the other different FCS topics. Budgeting is being wrapped up for the semester and the students were given a project to complete. They were given a scenerio of a person with their age, education, and marital status and were told to provide this person with a proper job, house, and a budget that would fit their income. This seemed to be a fun project for the kids and it really helped them comprehend the topic better because they had to critically think about what would work for this specific situation. While I am glad that I will soon be teaching the nutrition aspect of the course, I feel that it was beneficial for me to have sat in on classes about budgeting as well.

Check out this website

http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/

10/19/08-FCS Content

The teacher who I'm working with teaches the child development classes in the FCS department. I personally have not had as much experience in this area, so I'm kind of scared, but also really glad I have the opportunity to gain experience in Child Dev. before I student teach. On Thursday, two of the classes I was in were working on a unit called "Exploring the Body." The students were learning about the physical development of young children; for this unit, the teacher had a different student pretend to be the teacher for the entire class period each day. This was to help the kids prepare for next semester when they have a lab school in their classroom. The third class was working on projects that describe and explain 5 characteristics of pre-schools/child care centers. My host teacher gave me a text book to look at for the classes, which I really appreciate; it will really help me to catch up on the content the classes already covered, and prepare for what's coming up.