Learning Activity

     This following blog came from Mrs. Kallas's website which you can view here.

     For my first class activity, I am going to teach an activity that covers the topic of recognizing the amount of objects in a small group. For this, I created an activity that goes well with kindergarten math, involving counting.

    While I brainstormed an idea for this activity, I created a Board Builder on Discovery Education, which gave me many ideas for different projects. You can see my board right here, and you can view the screenshots of it below. 

     The activity that is shown below will help students practice recognizing the number of objects in a group, without having to count each of them. After recognizing the quantity, they will have to be able to identify and match it with the number of that quantity, which will also be shown in tally marks and dice dots.

Materials: 

1. Blue paper
2. White paper
3. Colored card stock
4. Velcro 
5. Rubber Cement
6. Scissors

Directions for Counting Activity:

1. Draw 78  raindrop shapes on blue pieces of paper
2. Draw 12  clouds on white paper
3. On each cloud, write the number, and show the tally marks and dice dots. For example, ( IIII, 4, and *4 dots*) 
4. Cut out the raindrops
5. Use glue or rubber cement to attach the raindrops to colored card stock.
6. Laminate the card stock and clouds
7. Cut out the clouds and attach a piece of velcro to the back
8. Attach the opposite piece of velcro to the card stock                

     The main idea of this activity is to teach the students to recognize a quantity, and match it with the recognized numbers or tallies. This activity is easy for kindergarteners, because all the students have to do is match each cloud with the correct number of rain drops. 

Find the Treasure in Teaching

This following TAFE blog came from the prompt on Mrs. Kallas's blog. You can view it here.

Click here to view the TAFE webpage

    Ahoy, matey! My recent TAFE experience was one I will never forget. Through this experience, I gained many treasures such as learning to cooperate with other group members, and learning how to be efficient and successful in such a short period of time. I competed in the Ethical Dilemma Competition with my fellow classmates, Emily, Lauren, and Lindsey. Below is a picture of us at the TAFE Region XI Conference at TCU on October 31, 2015. 

      In our competition, we placed first in our region. After all our hard work, I would not change the competition that we chose. I think the Ethical Dilemma was a great competition involving real life dilemmas. In doing this competition, I think it was helpful in preparing us for our future teaching careers.

      Although we were successful in our competition, we also encountered a few obstacles. Some which involved coming up with a final solution based on the many opinions of our classmates. Another obstacle was the fact that we had a small amount of class time to finish preparing for this competition, since the regional competition was extremely early this year. However, I also enjoyed many things about this project. For example, I enjoyed getting to work in a group, and design a creative presentation to compete with. I also liked the fact that this was a chapter competition, for we got to hear the different opinions and solutions from multiple points of view.

   

     If I had to do this project all over again, I would put more time and effort into our presentation in order to perfect it even more. For state, I will be sure to memorize all of my lines to create an even more professional presentation for our judges. I am extremely excited for our trip to state in the end of January of 2016.  To prepare for State, we are going to work to improve our presentation by gaining knowledge and opinions from different educators in our district. Below are a few more pictures from our trip to the TAFE Region XI Conference at TCU on October 31st.