Teaching the Manifest Destiny

     I was in the first group with four other teacher candidates for my fieldwork. We worked as a group to create and teach our lesson on Manifest Destiny to fourth graders for three days. 

    The first day my group taught was not the first day we met the student. We met the students on March 3rd to do ice-breaking activities with them, students. My group decided that we would make a wheel with all of the students' names and then let the student choose a card with a number to pick their questions. This was the day that I learned teaching online would be hard. This was because I could not see or hear the student's reactions, so from my point of view, the students did not seem to be enjoying the activity. The girls in my group who were in the class said that the students really enjoyed the activity because they liked seeing the wheel spin and noise and being able to pick the questions. We used two online resources to create the word wall, and the questions were wordwall.net and wheelofnames.com. These resources would be great to use in the classroom, especially when having a review. You could place the students in small groups, spin the wheel to pick who goes first, and then let them choose their questions. If no group gets it right, you will go back to the wheel. The students also took a pre-assessment that contained questions from all teacher candidate groups about the lessons they would be teaching. 

    On March 8th, my group taught a direct lesson, and this was when we did most, if not all, of the talking. We created the lesson on Google slides but added Peardeck to it, allowing us to create interactive slides for students. On these slides, we would put questions that the students could answer through multiple-choice, short answers, or just by moving a dot on their screen. 

    We introduced ourselves and went over the classroom rules to start the lesson. Then we jumped into the learning. We started the teaching by listening to two song verses written during the Westward expansion. The point of the verses was to introduce the students to how people felt moving West. After that, we asked the students to move the dot on their screens to point out where West was on the compass. After letting the students do that slide, we talked about how the United States expanded from the 13 colonies to the modern-day map. We also asked a true or false question of whether "New York was one of the original 13 states". At this point, we put a brain break, where the student was able to get up and move their bodies and give themselves a break from intaking so much information. My group chose a video from Young Dylan to dance to, but students do not have to do this if they do not want to. All students take breaks differently. Finally, we got into Manifest Destiny, and to start this topic, we let the students watch a schoolhouse rock video. After the video, we gave the students a slide to draw on that connected statements to pictures about information in the video they had just watched. After that question, we went over a famous painting from Manifest Destiny called the American Progress by John Gast. After talking about the pictures, we asked students to write two words for each sentence to complete the sentence. The first sentence was "settlers moved westward looking for ...", and the second sentence was "Native American tribes lost ...". After students answered that question, they watched a video on how Native Americans were affected by the Manifest Destiny, which led to the "name one thing that was devastating for the Native Americans because of America moving West. We went on to talk about what Manifest Destiny means, where the phrase came from, and what its purpose to the people was. We also talked about who and why people went West and about Homesteads. Two questions we asked between these slides were how the students were feeling because we felt we were giving them a lot of information to intake and what Americans were their purpose for moving West. 

    To end the lesson, we gave the students a knowledge check, and it was just a couple of questions about the lesson and gave them the list of vocabulary words we introduced during the lesson.

    March 10th is when my group taught our inquiry lesson. For this lesson, we wanted students to work in groups. First, we did a review, where students would draw lines to vocabulary from pictures. Then we went over that and did a more teacher-led verbal review. Students then looked at a digital map that allowed students to click on the key to see what answered some questions; after doing that, students responded to a question about two concepts and how they were related. Students answered the questions, and instead of seeing us talk on the next couple of slides, we pre-recorded them, so the students could listen to them. 

    For our group work, we wanted students to write a letter to the Library of Congress and try to convince them to open an exhibit about Native Americans. We sadly did not get to do this in class. The students were given jobs, a checklist to ensure they had all of the information, and a rubric for letter writing. 

On March 22nd, we did a cooperative learning lesson. This lesson was the hardest for me because I genuinely felt the problems with teaching online compared to class. So to start the lesson we did a recap of previous lessons because we had gone on break the week before. Then my other group members and I went over our projects. For our lesson, we chose to break the class up into five groups because there were five teachers, and all created different lessons. My lesson was to create a poster that would convince people to move West, and the rubric stated that to get all twos, the poster would need two sentences with at least two vocabulary words, at least one picture, and an exciting title. My group could not concentrate and would have instead worked with their actual teacher, who was in the classroom than me. The students also had tech problems the whole way through and could not focus. When it came time to present, the students had a poster with enough pictures but a weak sentence and title. Thes students had to fill out group and self-evaluation forms. The self-evaluation was to reflect on how they felt they worked in a group, and the group evaluation was to evaluate how they thought other students' presentations went.  After this, the students had to take a post-assessment to see what knowledge they had gained and write a short essay as another form of post-assessment.

    I enjoyed teaching, but I think I would prefer to do it in person next time to get the full effect of it. Also, I would like to plan earlier and organize earlier.