Week of 3/25/10

This week we discussed Bloom's Taxonomy and began our standards, goals and objectives for our unit plans. --- A lot to take in!

The power point on Bloom's is an awesome tool and is permanently saved to my laptop and a thumb drive :) I also printed out several key pages that are already worn from constantly referring to them. The fun little power point quiz was a great tool - also saved to alter for future use!

To me, Bloom's is really just how we should all be teachinng, what we've been learning about all semester. We can't just dump new material into a child's brain and then expect them to get meaning from it and remember it for life. Although there are some children out there who could learn that way, there are more that can not. We have to create to learn! I've known I've needed this my whole life, and sometimes thought I was stupid for needing that in order for things to make sense to me. I struggled in school my whole life because I had dull teachers who only ever asked us to understand what was taught and never really do anything else with it. When I imagine what my class room will be like - creating is key. Children need to be challenged to dig a little deeper and find real meaning in what they're doing. I think I'm going to incorporate this into my unit plan by having the students create a newspaper from the Civil War era with articles reflecting what life was like as a soldier, and opinions from the North and South.

The whole standars, goals, objectives and performance indicators is still pretty fuzzy for me. This is the first time I'm ever seeing anything like this and I'm definitely going to require some practice. If I do enough of them I'll get that hand of it! And, with the many practice's Dr. Smirnova has provided, I'm sure I'll get there soon enough :)