My 21st Century Classroom

 

My name is Alyssa Wood. I am 20 years old and I attend Edinboro University of Pennsylvania as an Education Major. I love helping children learn and succeed in anything that they do. I have always had a passion for teaching ever since I was a young girl. In my "This I Believe" video you will start to understand the reason why I yearned to become a teacher for so long, and also why I think many other people strive to become teachers, too. Things such as family or friends, life changing childhood experiences, and teacher experiences can effect and encourage one to gain passion for becoming a teacher one day.

My future plans as a learner are very open right now. I have many different things I still want to look into and things like that. I would like to continue in my path to become an educator, but I also would like to start study psychology and social work. I want to be able to not only teach, but understand the kids in my classroom. I do not want to have problems understanding what my kids are thinking and why they do not get certain things that I will be teaching them. My future plans as a teacher are a little bit undecided at this point as well. I do know that I would like to teach the younger students. I believe working with the kids at a young age, you can have a stronger effect on them. Kids learn a lot of things when they are young and just starting school, and i would love to be a part of that learning process.


Becoming a teacher and living in Erie, PA, as i do now, it would not be a good decision to stay around here. I think I would want to move down South. I am very fond of North Carolina and I found a school that I would like to teach in when I become an educator. The school is called Hillsborough Elementary School. It is in Hillsborough, North Carolina. I will have 15 students in my classroom and I will be teaching second grade math. I will have four African American students, two Hispanic students, one Native American student, and eight White students. Seven of my students are male and eight of them are female. I will have one special needs student in my classroom, who will have an aid. If you click here, it will take you to the page of demographics for Hillsborough Elementary School.

In this class the children will learn the numbers 1-100. The children will compare and order whole numbers to 1000. They will group objects into hundreds, tens, and ones, relating the groupings to a written numeral. Second grade math also includes fractions. The children will learn about halves, thirds, quarters, and eighths. They will also be learning how to count by 2s, 3s, 5s, 10s, 25s, and 100s. Coins are another thing taught in second grade math. They will be taught all of the money values. During this year, the students should be learning about measurements, as well. They should know both the customary and the metric systems. In learning about these measurements, the students should also realize when these units should be used and when they should not be used. They will earn what tools you use to measure the different kind of measurements, too. Clocks and calendars will also be used in this class to measure concepts of time. By the end o their second grade school year the students should be able to recall addition and subtraction facts.


My classroom is set up so the children have much space for their daily work. They have their desks, but there are also parts of the classroom where they can relax and read a book. There is also a section of the classroom for group time, reading and listening, science, math, and dramatic play. Having all these different sections will be good fro the children to not only get their mat work done that  I may assign them, but to also choose to take a break from what we are learning some days and work on other things, like reading and writing, after I am finished with my lesson for the day.

There are many different technologies in my classroom. There will be laptops for the children to work on during class when we need to use them. We will use those for any research that may have to be done, and also I would like to have skype meetings with other countries at certain times in my class to show the children the different ways of learning. There will also be a smart board that I will normally teach from. This is an advantage to the children because they can see how I am working the computer, so later on when they need to use the same thing, they already know how to use it, even thought I am there for any questions that they may still have or be confused about. Many other perks to my classroom will come along with experience. I cannot wait to become a teacher and encourage all my students to do well and have a wonderful time during their school years.

This is Sara, She has autism. She is very shy and has hard times creating friendships with the other children. Sara is very smart, but sometimes needs to learn a little slower than the other children in her classroom.

During this class, I have taken so many risks and became such a bigger person. I learned that there are many other ways to have fun and do work in the classroom, besides just a pencil and paper. There are blogs, videos, anything you can imagine, it is out there and waiting to be discovered and used by us educators. At first, I was frightened by all of the technology and such, but it began to grow on me and I have learned so much. I will continue to use many of the different activities and technologies that we have discovered throughout this class and carry it on to when I become a teacher some day.

http://www.time4learning.com/second-grade-math.shtml
http://www.movoto.com/public-schools/nc/hillsborough/primary/370348001932-hillsborough-elementary-school/402-n-nash-st.htm