Student+Teacher

In social studies for the past couple of weeks since we came back from February break, a student teacher Ms.Ketcham from UVM will be teaching social studies class for Mrs.Rossell. For Ms.Ketcham to be able to graduate college.

Ms.Ketcham is teaching our social studies class until about April! It must be hard to be handed over all of Mrs.Rossell’s work that she does with us and be expected to do it just as well as she did.

Before February break Ms.Ketcham joined us in social studies classes to help teach with Mrs.Rossell and get the feel of our leading classroom before she took over after February break. With Ms.Ketcham we have been working on the Middle East.

We started with a chart that we had to fill in on the country, capital, head of government, and natural resources. When we finished that she had us do a mapping activity with all of the countries capitals, rivers/seas, and some geographical features. We studied off of that map for a couple of days and then had a mini quiz to make sure that we were following along with what she was teaching us.

Next we branched off into some history in the Middle East. We took some notes on Mesopotamia and watched a video on the City Of UR. This video led us to a couple of different topics.

Ziggurats and earlier the Zagros mountains. I like that she does worksheets and explains and sometimes does a PowerPoint or video to kind of introduce what we are going to do for the day or a couple of days.

A man named Hammurabi made 232 laws, so we learned a little bit about him and his laws. We did a packet where we had to read and pick 5 of his laws to and answered questions about the laws and answered them in a paragraph.

Later she came up with making our own laws. We had to pretend that there aren't any laws in the U.S. and had to remake laws. Questions followed to make sure that the law that we made up was a reasonable law. For example a reasonable law is, All marriage is legal no matter your religion, race, or sexuality. An unreasonable law is that, Everyone has to be presented with a box of chocolate everyday.

We then moved onto doing some simple research and then created a poster on the item that was assigned to you. The subjects were, Plow, Sickle, Mortar and Pestle, Pottery Wheel, Cuneiform, and Wheel. We made the posters for 2 days and if we didn't finish we finished for homework.

I think overall Ms.Ketham is doing a great job teaching our class, and I'm sure she's doing great in all of the other social studies classes. I hope that she can get her teaching licence so she can have a great job.

Sometimes it's really hard to deal with our class, but somehow she always manages to fix all of the problems.

Written by Hannah