1. Developed an understanding of the scope and breadth of social studies topics and ideas that need to be covered in the elementary school curriculum.

               One of the projects that I feel met this course goal is a lot of our everyday in class assignments.  For weeks you would give each of us handouts that talked on different major events that have taken place on an elementary level.  All of those were examples of topics we need to teach and also ideas for how to do it, such as having each students individually stand and read their paper, with much enthusiasm, and not monotonous.  Also, I thought the human statues were a great idea also for teaching about Rosa Parks or any other event. 

               The other project that I feel went well with the course goal was our Community/Diversity Analysis Paper, because in order for us to write the paper, we were given the guidelines of what to include.  The Community/Diversity Analysis Paper was a reflection from our practicum experience this semester about how our host classrooms did or did not have a sense of community, how diverse the students are and what is taught in the classroom about the topics.  I think observing the classroom and writing the reflection using the guideline of questions showed me things and gave me ideas of how to teach community and diversity in my future classroom.  Those were two things that I had never thought about teaching before because when you think of a teacher, reading, writing and arithematic comes to mind, instead of deeper issues that must be taught also.  Below is a link to my Community/Diversity Analysis Paper.

             The project that I feel met this course goal was putting together the Unit Plan as a group.  Even though our whole unit plan is on the same topic, we all have  different perspectives that we all are sharing.  All of our lessons within our group addressed diverse learning needs by incorporating many multiple intelligences into our lessons, for example, we used music, photostory, activitiy sheets, quizzes, and much more.  We tried to keep in mind that all children learn in different ways, so we tried to touch on as many intelligences as we could.  We also had activities that were hands-on, such as having the students create their own PowerPoints.  Below is a link to the Unit Plan that my group created.

              The project that, I think, goes with this course goal is our Children's Book Project.  For this project, we were to pick a woman who made one or many contributions and check out books from the library on our specific person, then create a full lesson plan on what and how we would teach about her.  This project explored the strategies of developing an interdisciplinary approach to social studies instruction by forcing us to come up with new and creative ways to teach and assess students.  For example, instead of testing the normal way of a written test, we learned to come up with different ways, such as group presentations, powerpoints, projects, etc.  This helps out the student who has test anxiety and also keeps the students more interested, because it is more fun than taking a silent 45 minute test, where by the end of the test, your brain feels like jello and you start second guessing yourself.   By being more creative, you can also integrate other subjects into one, for example, if I had Amelia Earhart, I could teach about her, but also take my students to the gym and play an airplane game, that combines learning and exercising together, making the lesson integrated.  An interdisciplinary or integrated approach is very effective, because students enjoy it and learn more, not even realizing it sometimes. They might be having so much fun in the gym that they do not even realize that they are learning something.  You might could also take it in another direction.  You might be teaching about Amelia Earhart and you want to integrate some language into the lesson, so you could analyze one of the letters she may have written home during one of her flights.  You could also incorporate math into the lesson by calculating how many miles she went in a certain amount of time, and so forth.  Below is a link to my Children's Book Project.