Adopt A Classroom

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Recently I signed up at Adopt A Classroom for school supplies for my classroom. If you think that you might be interested in adopting my classroom, please follow the link above! :-)

Life

Today in class we had to create a simple timeline including something that we remember from each year of our life. It was very interesting, and very fun! It was amazing as I would put things down and it would trigger other memories. I was amazed though at how much I had forgotten. It made me realize the importance in writing down life events. The things I look at just everyday things I now realize have changed so drastically just in my life span. I think that it would be a great assignment to do with the kids even at my grade level.

Agriculture Today

I have actually lived in the middle of Parsons my entire life, but as a child I attended grades 2-8 at a school outside of town that was considered a rural school. It was actually created due to the fact that they combined multiple rural one-room schoolhouses in order to build one school for the rural community for ages K-8. My mother was a teacher at this school, so I would travel back and forth with her everyday. All of my friends (there were always more than 30 of us in a class) traveled to and from school on the bus. Some had to ride over an hour just to get to school or get home they had to travel such a distance across the county. While I new I attended a rural school, when I look back today I realize that many of my classmates were rural and their parents might have had cattle, they all had other jobs and didn’t just farm. One was a lawyer, one worked at a farming newspaper, etc. My best friend though lived on a true farm and I spent many, many hours on this farm between kindergarten and high school. I have some GREAT memories from this farm. I remember playing in the hay barn, swimming in a stock pool, and riding in the bucket of the loader. I would always enjoy getting up and doing Saturday morning chores and feeding the new baby calves. During the winter it was nothing to go over there and there was a calf in the back bathroom.

Looking back though I realize that they are one of the few remaining large farms in our area. I would guess that they actually own a large part of the county when it comes to land. My best friend’s dad and his brother ran the farm. My best friend’s brother has now joined the family business.

I remember when I first started going to the farm they had a dairy. They would milk the cows. My best friend didn’t like milk because she always told me where it comes from. J I would guess that about second or third grade they sold the dairy end of the farm though and went to just farming land and cattle.

You definitely do not see as much farmed land as you used to. Most of the people living in the country today just live there and do not farm there. We have a few teachers in our district that teach and keep cattle on the side. Very few small farms are still working today. The larger family farms have bought out most.

In my classroom I have actually had a couple of kids the last few years that often talk about working on the farm, but it is mostly dealing with their cattle, and they have all been from the same family. Their dad has a full time job outside of farming also.

In my area another place that you could check about area farms would be our local Farm Bureau. We also have a state agency in our county that deals a lot with farmers and working on them do their job easier while taking care of the land.

Bakke Case

I found Affirmative Action to be a very interesting subject. I honestly can't ever even remember hearing about it before in this sense. I knew that sometimes there were a designated number of minorities that were hired to make schools/businesses look "good,” but I was totally unaware of this case. It was an eye opener and forced me to really think about the subject, my feelings in this case, and the feelings of discrimination as a whole.

For my own thoughts it reminded me in a sense of the general education classroom. The "gifted" students receive extra services and require extra attention from the teacher so that they are challenged, while on the other end of the spectrum the "special education" kids also receive special services and require extra attention from the teacher to make sure that they are not falling behind in the classroom. Therefore the "average" students that one-day will hold most of the jobs in our country are left with the least attention to their education. Sometimes the "general population" is the one that is actually discriminated against due to special regulations and laws.

In the classroom sense I would use this court case to go with my historical thinking standard. I teach in a low socio-economic school with a high level of minorities. But, I always find it interesting when we talk about civil rights and how involved they get in the discussions. I think that this one might be an interesting discussion that we could have. I would first give them the general background information of this topic so that they knew what we were talking about and then we would open the floor up for discussion with me being the moderator/leader in order to keep control of the discussion. It would be interesting to hear their views on the subject. Then we would take the knowledge and thinking that they had gathered and I would ask them to apply this to something that could affect them today and how they would react. For example I have some very sports oriented students. How would they feel if they didn’t make the team even though they were the better player due to the fact that a certain number of minority or not minority students had to make the team? I think that it would prove to be a very interesting social studies lesson.

Vietnam - National Archives

ARC Identifier: 532481

Vietnam. Walter Cronkite of CBS interviewing Professor Mai of the University of Hue. , 02/20/1968

I chose this picture because it shows some different things from the time period of the Vietnam War. We could talk about the technology changes and the way that the people looked. Even the background could be discussed. It would be interesting for them to look at some different pictures of several different wars throughout history and compare and contrast the wars. We could discuss what the Vietnam War was, but I would not go into a lot of detail about the war due to the age and maturity of my fourth grade students.

Guthridge 4 / 5th Graders In Their Costumes From Their Wax Museum

Truman Presidential Library

I was totally impressed by the Truman Presidential Library website. I was able to visit the Truman Presidential Library when I was a sophomore in high school. There are two things that stood out the most to me. One, I had the best high school principal in the world. He actually grew up on the same block that President Truman lived on after he had retired from the presidency. He told us how he used to take walks with President Truman. I remember thinking how very cool that was! I also remember from my trip to the Truman Presidential Library that Truman was instrumental in the creation of the United Nations. The United Nations was in the news quite a bit due to decisions being made during Desert Storm that was going on at the time.

The Truman Presidential Library was very user friendly and had a GREAT kids page. I downloaded the Truman PowerPoint and I learned so much. I thought it to be very age appropriate, even for my fourth graders. There were several things that they talked about that I would love to discuss with my fourth graders, for example the fact that he memorized the eye chart in order to get into the military. WOW! I also liked the fact that he was just an everyday person like my students are growing up. There was even a quick little assessment at the end of the PowerPoint. AWESOME! The Mo the mule was a hoot. It was exactly what would draw an elementary student’s attention.

On the kids page there was even a section to help in teaching the branches of government. This is going to be very helpful in my classroom! Every year I find it a struggle to teach this. My students always have some trouble with this and these concrete materials should help them immensely!

I was just very pleased with the great, user-friendly resources that this site had to offer!