TED 633 Assignment 3A:

Lesson: Plymouth Colony

The most enjoyable thing about teaching was the questions - the kids had many and I got off my intended task quite often to answer them. They were all relevant but I found myself having to limit questions to intermittent periods of discussion. The kids were much more interested in back and forth discussion than working on the individual and group assignments. For instance, one girl wanted to know if the settler woman were allowed to marry the Indian men and vice versa. This came up because during an earlier lesson on Spanish colonization we learned that the non-noble males were not allowed to bring woman and were encouraged to intermarry with the native population and convert them whereas northern European (English and Dutch) colonial patters did not encourage racial intermarriage and did encourage woman to go to the Americas. Inter society marriage, while it did happen, was not the norm amongst English and Dutch settlers. We continued with the Early colonial America theme and as part of the lesson we made powtash - a type of stew made from onions, beans, venison, and wild fowl.  This would have been a common Wampanoag meal. If we continue to have these joint sessions I will be moving into the Great Awakening but after Christmas I am going to be much more busy with my job at work because we have two ladies out on maternity leave and will be undergoing a tri-annual state audit so I will have less time for the homeschool cooperative until the audit is over and the ladies are back from maternity leave. The lessons will most likely be restricted to my own kids and one or two closer family friends during this period of time.

The pre-and post tests were making more sense to the kids once they learned pretests are not graded and were not expected to know everything on them unless it had been previously covered. Some topics had been covered with their families ahead of time but for some kids the lesson was new.  I use pre-assessments as a derivative of the "Data-not -guess-work" program. They are generally for myself. I encouraged the kids to use them to make note of things they did not yet know and then see if they could answer the questions later.

As an accommodation for one child who has a specific reading and writing disability I verbally asked him the questions and he answered them much better than he had on the previous pre-assessment. He has strong oral language skills but could use some encouragement with his writing skills. His mom did not want his needs pointed out so I took him aside under pretense of getting things ready for scouts (he is a troop leader in our kids scout group as well as part of the home school group) while the other kids were working together. The main post assessment was a cooperative group assignment in which the kids answered some questions together. Over all it went well but personally I prefer a more individualized summative format. During my classes at National I have been experimenting more with non preferred activities so as to increase my exposure//understanding, and use of these formats too.

Things I would maybe do differently is maybe set aside specific Q/A periods throughout the lesson as sometimes one question would lead to another. In the homeschool groups we are not under pressure to reach point A,B,C within a certain amount of time so we can often explore tangents as we see fit. Having taught in a NPS though I know this is not a luxury classroom teachers often get so I would have to become slightly more formalized when I transition back to a more structured district setting.