Guess who's backkkkkk.......

Today was officially my first day back to school with Dr. Smirnova. This semester we are not doing science, we are doing Methods of Teaching Social Studies.

The first thing Dr. Smirnova did was bring the class down to the library and had Tiffany explain and demonstrate all of the resources made available to us at Mount Saint  Mary College. I was amazed at all of the things that are available to us that we did not know about. I have been at MSMC since 2008, and I have just learned all about amazing tools and technology that were always there.
This was done on the first day because Dr. Smirnova loves to share knowledge and resources and what better time to do it than on the very first day, what an introduction!!!!
 
The next thing we did was go back to our classroom where we completed an ice breaking activity.
We broke up into groups and created name tags and answered four questions:

1) What country is our heritage from.
2) Where were you born, where do you live now.
3)What does Social Studies mean to you?
4) What skills will you develop during this class to be an effective Social Studies teacher


This was done to break the ice, to get to know the class, and for the class to get to know one another. This activity also let Dr. Smirnova know what our thoughts were about Social Studies.
This was a vision of what our class will be about, what it will be like. A lot of group work and collaborative projects will take place for sure! This will also give us ideas of how to use collaboration in the future.

While we did our group work there was light music playing in the background. Research has shown that music stimulates interaction.
                                                   

One of the main concepts we spoke about as a class was what is Pedagogy:

It is the science and art of teaching.
Teaching is a science because we teachers know the theories behind it, we make a plan, we differentiate and know how each student is different. It is an art  because even though we have the same goals and content, our classrooms are our own worlds. We each have our very own special way we teach and how we create our learning environments. We each add our very own style..........