There’s always so much excitement in the lead up to the end of Fall Semester. Sure, there’s plenty of stress from completing last minute projects and studying, but the anticipation of the winter holidays has a way of carrying students through to the end. Because of the upcoming Christmas season, my housemates and I decided to do a Secret Santa gift exchange on Friday night of Dead Week.
We all settled into the living room and took turns guessing and opening our gifts. Two of the gifts had fragrances: body wash and a lavender heating/cooling stress pad (this will be important later). So, the four of us are chatting it up in our living room when Lauren, the person who got the lavender pad, said, “Ooo it’s scented!” prompting my other housemate, Cassie, to come up and smell it. After sniffing it two or three times, my housemate declared, “I don’t smell anything.” Another important sidenote is that Cassie had been sick the past two weeks, but we’d all said it was “just a cold.” Anywho, Lauren commanded Cassie to go take a covid test. Fifteen minutes later, Cassie looked at her test and her eyes become the size of saucers. In a hushed voice she stated, “It’s positive.”
Having known Cassie since high school, I played it off saying, “Yeah, right,” since we’d all been joking around. Cassie then held up the test to show us that it was indeed positive. Lauren yelled, “Go to your room now!” while Makena and I scrambled around the house looking for masks, other tests, and standard cleaning products, like that scene in Monsters Inc.
After placing Cassie in quarantine, Lauren, Makena, and I went to Campus Safety to get Covid tests. We got home and after testing negative, isolated ourselves all weekend. Come Tuesday night, I was beginning to lose all motivation to complete my last three take home exams. So, I changed my playlist from the Piano Guys to random throwbacks from the early 2000s. The first song that played was Tonight Tonight by Hot Chelle Rae.
I turned the volume up all the way and started having an Emergency Dance Party that spread into the hallway. I set my Bluetooth speaker right outside Cassie’s door and Makena and I started dancing and singing at the top of our lungs. Eventually, we moved to the kitchen and Lauren started making pancakes (just because). By the time Winter Break started Thursday afternoon, everyone had completed the last of their finals and Cassie remained the only one of us to have tested positive.
As a senior in high school, I thought I wanted to be a nurse. I then realized that certain aspects of nursing school would not be a good fit for me. I took a class called Christian call where I got to help in a Pre-K classroom. I loved it and knew I wanted to be a teacher! As a freshman at community college, I knew this was because I loved being with kids. That following summer my mom told me to look up alternative options because she didn’t think that teaching would be a good fit for me. I saw Child Life Specialist and did a lot of research on the field and what steps I needed to take to become certified. You can have a Bachelor’s in anything as long as you meet the requirements for 10 specified courses, have completed a Practicum at a hospital, and a 600-hour Internship. Then you will have to take a test to be certified, similar to NCLEX for nurses. Child Life Specialists are individuals that work alongside hospitalized children to help reduce stress, anxiety, and trauma by educating patients about their bodies and procedures through medical play therapy. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to distract kids with bubbles. It won’t be all sunshine and rainbows. I will also navigate families and kids through grief and loss or even abuse and trauma. I feel super excited to have found a profession that matches my interests, passions, personality, and work style. This profession is not commonly known and is incredibly competitive. I decided last spring to not pursue licensure and won’t be going into my MAT year. I will instead get a M.S. in Child Life after graduation. I didn’t seriously commit to this profession until last March/April. In this past month I’ve applied to 4 programs and am waiting to hear back. I have attached 2 Tiktoks, 1 is how I’m feeling going into the profession and the schooling and the other is a sneak peek of what my day would look like as a future Certified Child Life Specialist.
IV Medical Play with a child life specialist. This usually takes 20 minutes or so with a patient. I give as many choices to them as possible and let them be in control. Answer any questions they have and clarify any misconceptions. Not enough time in this video to go fully in depth LOL! #medicalplay#childlifespecialist#childlife#ccls#pediatrics
Hello, my name is Haley Vick, and while I am not quite a teacher, I have a pretty good idea of what the days may feel like during the week. I cannot speak for everyone, but I thought I would share how these days, I imagine, will make me feel.
Monday:
After recovering from the weekend, no matter what that looks like, it might take us a minute to get back into it…but we are trying. Mondays we try to be productive and start the week off right, so A for effort.
Tuesdays:
Tuesdays, they are not my favorite. It is a reminder that you have only one day in the week accomplished. The kids own the yellow car in this scenario.
Wednesday:
I love Wednesdays. Not sure why, but as teachers, we love being halfway through the week. Yay for getting over the hump.
Thursdays:
It is almost Friday! These next two days got nothing on us.
FRIDAYS:
Yay! We made it, it’s Friday and almost the weekend to relax and do whatever we want. We love a good Friyay.
I hope you enjoyed how I feel about the weekdays, in GIF form.
This is a condensed explanation of my journey from almost dropping out of high school to being a few months away from earning my Bachelors degree. Also, have a chill RHCP song.
Hello all, my name is Chandler M. and I’ve been in school for the last 20 years of my life. Having earned an associates and now on my final year of work towards my bachelors degree in education, with hopes to join the PACE program immediately after graduation, I have honed my life in most ways towards the benefit of my school work through years of struggle and determination. Though I have learned to succeed at UP, it wasn’t until years of mistakes under my belt before I began to take my schooling seriously. At first, I didn’t much care for school and truly sat through it as that was what was expected of me. My IEP kept me barely above water, and I severely struggled with turning in my work, and don’t even get me started on the amount of work I would do, and then never turn in. This became a downward spiral for me when I was in middle school and continued throughout high school until the very end of my sophomore year. At this point, I felt that “I would just go to a state school with my friends, right?” Needless to say, my GPA at the time wouldn’t have allowed for this. This was the year that I was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to any college or university because of my grades unless I stepped back and took a serious change towards my education by my school counselor. This was world-shattering to my high school self. I knew that I wasn’t giving my all towards school, but no one had vocalized the amount of damage I was doing to my future prospects until this point. That’s when I decided that I would give school my absolute highest effort if not for my instant benefit, the benefit of my future. I began to push myself academically and give my 110% towards school in all aspects. I would arrive early, I would leave late from asking questions, and if I wasn’t clear on something I would stay upwards of 2 hours after school ended asking different teachers for guidance if they would have me. My grades began to reflect these changes in behavior, and my name started showing up in the quarterly honor roll list in the hall, then I aced my language class and was allowed the opportunity to go to Japan with a few of my classmates including two of my closest friends today.
Trying to find an interesting video on where I had my week-long homestay, I ran into this one which shows several of the locations and people I met myself on my trip there in high school.
The experience of traveling to another country for the first time was life-changing to say the least. I met amazing people, ate great food, and made a lot of memories. But one of the most important things that happened on that trip was meeting a member of the JET program, which is for education majors from other countries to come to Japan to teach for a stretch of time in a professional setting. At the time I was entirely mesmerized by this concept. Going to another country and living there? Teaching others English? It seemed so interesting to me, I was awestruck by its mere existence, and I wanted desperately to join it. This was my initial push towards bringing my grades up, and this allowed me to bring my GPA up high enough to seriously consider college.
At first I thought about going to OSU with my classmates, but I was unsure in myself if I could truly keep up my forward momentum academically. After all, it was only my second year of being able to pass all of my classes instead of only 2-3/6. With this in mind I looked towards community college and settled on attending at Portland Community College, the “Largest Community College in Oregon”.
Community college was a whole other beast compared to high school, and I knew this heading in. At the beginning of my attendance here I wasn’t used to acting on my own, and time management wasn’t something that I had a complete grasp on thus far. However, over my 3 year attendance here, I learned a lot about several concepts and topics that I had interest in, and met many wonderful and extremely supportive professors, including the professor of my only education courses, who I had for 3 terms in a row. I learned a lot about education here, and a few life lessons as well. One such life lesson is knowing how to manage my time. When I came in, I was working full time, and going to school full time. I would stay up until 4 am most days and manage to wake up just in time for my 10am classes. I was truly burning the candle at both ends, to nobody’s benefit. I was coming in late to class, I was calling out of work because I couldn’t stay awake long enough to drive.
It was at this point that I was forced to work less with my introduction to having to travel to 2 campuses for class on the same day, with a 30 minute drive on a good day in between. The Rock Creek and Sylvania campuses are both beautiful and yet completely different from one another in the needs they require to attend.
Sylvania is the main campus and has an extensive amount of parking, and everything is very close together, a wonderful use of space, although be it slightly confusing to get around. Rock creek however, which was over 35 minutes from Sylvania, thus bringing my commute every day up to over an hour from home, is very spaced out, and has large stretches of lawn between the different buildings that classes are held. This was not something that I was used to, and had to change how I thought about time in order to arrive to places on time, and prepared for class to start before the class started.
Time was truly not on my side.
This commute, and struggle with timing forced my hand. I had to cut something out, but what? How was I going to be able to afford driving to school, taking my courses, completing assignments, and work all in the same day? The answer? I didn’t. At this point, I stopped driving to both campuses, I began to use the shuttle system that ran like clockwork between Sylvania and Rock Creek, I learned the absolute limit as to how long I could spend my time studying and reading and still be able to just make it to the bus stop in time. I learned when the the gates to the campus opened so I could spend more time before class completing assignments and finishing assigned readings, and I learned when the last bus ran back to Sylvania to spend the most of my time completing my course work. I became methodical, working like a machine to keep myself afloat.
At this point, I had only one goal in mind, get my degree, and move on. I couldn’t think of anything else more important to me than simply pursuing education even further. I had some set backs, I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it at some points, or that I might break. But I continued onward with the hope of someday becoming a teacher. Throughout this time, I managed to spend at least some amount of time out of every school year helping out in one of the local schools to my area. Sometimes I would simply observe, sometimes I would interview them for an assignment, and sometimes I simply helped print out papers and cut out materials. But through these experiences I learned lessons in classroom management, resource management, had ideas for future lessons, and figured out the grade range I would feel most comfortable teaching.
On my 4th year out of high school I began to go to UP. This was a big deal for my family, as the last 3 generations on either side never went through college. Since then, I have continued to give everything I have in school. I start assignments the day I receive them when possible, and ask (sometimes too many) questions. Though sometimes it seems like everything is getting a little shaky, I have a wonderful group of friends and family who are there to support me. As well as excellent colleagues who push me to achieve greater goals.
With that being said, I’m nearing the end of my 20 year educational journey, and am excited to see what the future has in store for me. I have come a long way, and owe it all to a lot of different people. I hope to graduate this spring, and I know if I keep track of my time, keep a level head, and finish my assignments early, I will be well on my way to turn my educational career, into a teaching career.
Hello! My name is Nicole Pagtakhan and I like saving memories, so this first post will be about me as a student and things I’ll want to look back on or might want to use when I’m a teacher!
Favorite song at the moment…
(Me looking for the Binky gif I want to use and not finding it)
Here’s the original so you don’t have to look for it <3
Field experience!
Ockley Green | Mr. Toole’s math 6th grade
Astor Elementary | Miss Jessica’s 4th & 5th grade
Terra Linda Elementary | Mrs. Craft’s 3rd grade, Mrs. Piper’s 2nd grade, Mrs. Westeyn’s 2nd grade, Mrs. Taefy-Cross’s 3rd grade
Quotes from some students (& my thoughts)
“Your drawings are trash, have you seen my comic book?”
– 6th grader
He opened up a binder full of hand-drawn comic books, and I was so impressed! This was on my first day too :))
“Is that Rihanna?”
– 6th grader
The teacher likes using celebrities and animals in his mood meter check-in. It was Beyonce.
“Can I teach you how to tap dance?”
– 3rd grader
I didn’t understand the pattern for a while and she looked frustrated while I was figuring it out HAHA I’m still a learner too!
*Explaining Rainbow Friends on Roblox to me because they were trying to recreate it for me to ‘play’*
– at least two 2nd graders at the same time
I hadn’t heard of it before and I’d been playing a lot of games on Roblox with friends so this piqued my interest
“You play Roblox?!”
– 2nd grader
It’s SO funny when they find out I play video games, they’re so surprised!
*future classroom inspiration*
I’d use this to know how they’re feeling regularly throughout the day, and make sure to speak with students one-on-one if I see they need help.
I love how cozy this looks! I’ve seen teachers buying Squishmallows for their reading corners too and that’s going to be my excuse to buy them >:)
Well, winter break came and went much too quick. With student teaching starting up on January 3rd, I had to get back from my adventures quick. My adventures all started with a day and a half trip at home. This trip was hallmarked by the swearing in of my brother to become a Sheriff’s deputy. I was glad to finally be there while he was sworn in because I joked with him that he looked like Paul Blart during the police academy.
One of many viral Tik Tok videos covering the madness that ensued.
We finally were able to make it to California and spend time with my family for the holidays. The five days were spent with family as much as possible. Filled with memories, good food, smiles, and lots of love. A bittersweet time as my grandpa is quickly losing a battle to dementia. Family has always been a priority for me so spending the sweet moments around the holidays with them meant a lot to me. Definitely a holiday season that I will never forget.
My beautiful hometown (Petaluma, Ca) during the Holidays
My winter break ended much how it had been in the middle with delayed flights. I had originally planned to be back in Portland at 9 pm the night before I had to go teach. But, Alaska Airlines had other plans for me. My plane was delayed from taking of until 1:30 am, eventually making it home by 3 am. With myself being the diligently planned person, I was up until 4:30 am preparing slides for my students. At 7 am, my power nap was over and it was back to the real world.
Live Video of Me Waking Up With 2.5 Hours of Sleep
My break was jam-packed, and I am excited for the adventures that lie ahead.
This lesson is designed for 4th grade social studies.
Instructions
For this assignment, students will first spend free time throughout multiple class sessions reading through pamphlets around the world, each about different landmarks around the globe. Students will then decide one to research on, and will create a poster about their landmark. The poster should say where the landmark is located, should be full of plenty of facts, and should have some interesting pieces of trivia as well. Students are also welcome to draw and color their landmarks as well on the poster.
Then, students will be split into two groups at random. Afterwards, they will need to open their computers, open the pre-made Google My Maps, and will place a pin on the location they created their poster on, with the color of their pin showing which group they are in. Then, students will be split into two groups. Students will then write down questions they have for the landmarks labeled by the opposite group. Finally, the two groups will switch off, with one group starting by standing near their poster and presenting their info on it, while the other group walks around the room, asking questions about the landmarks and taking notes. Afterwards the two groups will switch, and the lesson will end with a quick write up about a few interesting facts they learned.
Instructional goal
This lesson is designed to help students improve at important skills such as researching a specific topic, choosing necessary and important info, writing critical questions, and presenting the information they have learned. The Google My Maps tool will help students get a good visual as to where in the world certain landmarks are, and also will help them gain perspective as to how far apart they are.
The world of education has seen a lot of change in the last few years, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic which turned schooling into a digital affair. Teachers and students alike were thrown into the unfamiliar world of Zoom m meetings and new digital tools designed to enrich online learning. This semester has introduced m e to new technological tools I didn’t kn ow existed at the beginning of the year that are n ops regularly used in m y lesson planning and teaching.
This portfolio will walk you through many different types of lessons utilizing these new online tools. Here are a few of my favorites!
Math popcorn party! Students engage with different images to learn about numbers!
What do you know, wonder (and what have you learned)? Students use a Digital KWL chart to track their learning
Teaching kindness, students recognize kindness through an interactive video lesson
Grow, grow, grow butterflies: students use a butterfly webpage to engage with a butterfly growing unit
Follow along with me to learn new and creative ways to engage your students through technology!
As we all know, the last few years of quarantined have pulled our students out of school and sent them home, where for many of them their social development continued to grow, at a much slower rate. School for many students is a large portion of their social development, working with teachers and other students their own age teaches them how to interact with the world, how to monitor their own emotions, and how to socially engage with other people. When they were sent home, many students interacted only with their immediate families for almost two years, some students only communicating with their friends via online platforms. This lack of social contact has created classrooms full of students in desperate need of social emotional lessons.
Photo by 1499841 from Pixabay
At the elementary level, the zones of regulations are an excellent tool to teach students to identify their emotions and respond appropriately to manage them. In my classroom, we created wall posters that show students the emotions in each zone and give them the chance to visually see what their emotions look like. We’ve been learning about the zones of regulation all year, and we’ve done many lessons on each zone and how students can manage their emotions responsibly in each zone. This lesson I’m sharing with you today is an accumulation lesson where students are able to work together to teach me about each zone of regulation.
I’ve created a slide on Jamboard for each zone of regulation and I’m going to split my class into four groups, one for each zone. Each group is going to be in charge of making a slide for the zone of regulation they’ve been assigned. Their slide can include pictures, text, drawings about which emotions are included in that zone, what this zone feels like, and ways to manage their emotions in this zone. Jamboard is a fun, easy online tool to help my class collaborate with one another to create a slide they are proud of. Once every group is finished, each group will stand and teach the class about their zone of regulation.
By the end of this lesson, I want students to be able to accumulate their learning and verbalize different aspects from each zone of regulation. This lesson uses Jamboard to facilitate collaboration, promote easy presenting, and encourage creativity to accomplish this goal. I am excited to see what my students come up with and hope you’ve been inspired to perhaps introduce social emotional learning into your classroom this year.
Technology has become a part of our everyday lives and has improved the way we work, communicate, and learn. I have learned about so many different apps that I had never heard of/ had no idea how to use! Not only did I learn how to apply these in my future lesson planning, but also have used some of these tools in my day-to-day life (I planned my road trip home for the summer using MyMaps!) which has been awesome! Below I have embedded some of my favorite projects from this semester!
Opinion Writing Using Book Creator
This activity allows for students to become real authors! I designed this lesson for students to practice opinion writing in a way that was exciting and fun and where they could feel like real writers! I created an example of what one could look like where I shared my opinion stating that I think I deserve a dog! This was super fun to create and I loved learning how to use this app.
I loved making these forms on Google Drive that provide students with a chance to get to know their teacher! I think that this would be so fun to do in the very beginning of the year as an ice breaker. I also would love to create a Google Form for students to fill out that would allow teachers to get to know their students as well!
Explore the Pony Express Trail Using Google MyMaps
I really enjoyed making this project on Google MyMaps and learning how to use this software. I think that this is a really great tool to use when learning about historical events, as students can jump right into where everything took place! I liked mapping out the trail and I think that students would enjoy virtually following it and doing research about it.
For this project, Lannie Hisashima and I created a GoogleSite with information about the different planets in our solar system. This was a great tool to use because I was able to stay organized and show information in a way that made a lot of sense! I think that this is something that I will definitely use in my future classroom for a lot of different topics! I like the idea of students having a place where they can refer to the information we learned about.
I really enjoyed exploring so many different types of apps online and putting them to use. I feel so much more confident using these sites and also diving into other new websites! Technology is such an important tool in the classroom and I am excited to embed it into my teaching!
When I started this semester, I knew little about technology and felt poorly about my abilities to navigate through these resources. Now that we’re nearing the end of the semester, I feel much more confident in the skills that I have in order to create and teach a lesson in a clear and creative way. Truthfully, I wanted to engage my students with technology ini the classroom but as far as I figured I’d do that was on a smart board. When I was in school, the ability to write on our smart board with the tech pens, was an absolute privilege and I thought that was probably as much as I’d do. After this semester, I’m very excited to get into the classroom and engage my students with materials through technology. Here are some of the projects I’ve created over the semester that I’m pretty proud of.
1. Teaching with Images – This lesson was done early on in the semester and was a only the beginning of what I would be learning. It isn’t a complex post but it was fun to create and good insight into what I could do.
2. Teaching with Jamboard – This lesson is a Jamboard for students to fill out. It’s a circle map that students will complete with an animal of their choosing in the middle. On Jamboard, students can add text or pictures and it doesn’t take a lot to figure out.
3. Teaching with Ed Puzzle – This lesson was probably one of the most fun ones I created because it takes a youtube video and adds interactive questions while the students watch. I organized it so students will know if they got the answer right or wrong as soon as they fill it out and if they don’t get the answer correctly, they have the opportunity to watch the video again. This can be so beneficial because assigning youtube videos for homework is hard to monitor for completion.
4. Teaching with Google Forms – This lesson was a simple about me form and asks questions about who I am as a person and a teacher as well as my expectations of the students. This will be super beneficial in the future because it gives students the opportunity to get their answers back asap, it allows the teacher to easily write the questions and the style of them, and it’s easy for the teacher to keep organized when all the students turn it in.
5. Teaching with Google Sites – This is my second time using google sites – the first time was in partners and we did a lesson on magnets. The reason why I like google sites is because it is an easy to organize a lot of information. I plan on using this in the future by uploading my whole unit to a google site and allowing my students to explore it as we go through. Something that is beneficial about this is students will have access to the information early. They can look through all the pages of the google site and see how each lesson is connected with one another, they will also be able to access the material outside of the class which will be nice if they want to share information and material they learned in class. I also think that it’s fairly easy to use and therefore not a huge hassle to create.
