I have loved the first week of being in the 5th grade classroom! for the first couple of days we just watched and helped the kids when they were doing work, and just kind of figuring out how our teacher handles the classroom. he does a money system for rewards and for punishment, he also has a system set up where every student has a job, and it keeps the whole class in working order so I was really impressed with that.
We got the opportunity to teach on Thursday. For Social studies, science, and Language arts, so we actually taught science. Our lesson was on earthquakes, first we showed them a digital story that Bryant made and had them fill out a short worksheet during the video, then we did a seismograph activity where I had made one (a table with a chair on top of it and a string tied the the bottom of the chair and a marker at the other end of the string and paper on the table under the chair that the marker was touching) and showed them how scientist measure the intensity of an earthquake. then the students either made a visual art project on a paper showing one of the types of faults, or built a structure with Popsicle sticks and put it on a "fault" (two Kleenex boxes side by side) to show what the motion of the fault looked like. then each group presented their project with 2 facts about earthquakes.
since they do rotations we taught the lesson three times, the first time it was really crazy and we had to make some adjustments for the next two lessons, we went over the instructions for the projects step by step and had the students tell us after what the steps were, so the next two lessons went a lot smother. anyway, it was really fun and harder than I expected.

Moon Festival

This is my digital story about the chinese legend of the lady in the moon!

Digital Story Reflection

Doing this assignment I learned a lot more about the legend of the moon festival that I had heard bits and pieces of while I was in china, it was fun to put together the pieces I had heard with the many versions I read of the legend to make my story. Most of the technical skills I already knew how to do, but there were a few things I learned, for exaple; how to use Audacity to cut music up to fit the story, how to put the pieces together to make up a digital story, and how to test and make a mic sound better. I learned that to make a digital story you have to have a story first, then find pictures, and finally music to fit both of those, and if you do those in the wrong order then your story won't turn out as good. all in all this was a fun activity that I would definitaly use in the classroom with my future students.