Reflections on this semester

This past semester has been a life changing semester. I was accepted into the Teacher Education program within the College of Education. I am also enrolled in all education courses relevant to my major. God has blessed me in so many ways this semester is unbelievable. All of the opportunities that I have been provided with have altered/affected my life in so many different ways.

There are two milestones you have while you are in the College of Education at Auburn. The first one is getting accepted into Teacher Education and the second one is getting accepted into your internship. Well, I can thankfully say that I have have passed and been accepted into the Teacher Education program. The pre-teaching that I had to do before entering into Teacher Education was an incredible experience. I got to see first hand how a classroom operates and get a feeling of how it is to be the teacher in a classroom. Although I did not teach, my observing teacher let me participate in many of the activities that the students participated in. It assured my love for my future career even more than before.

I finally finished taking all of my basic classes and got into all education core classes. I am taking wonderful courses that have taught me so much about myself about teaching. One class that I have benefited from the most is my Media for Children class. Learning (and some re-learning) about book genres, appropriate age level books, ways to incorporate literature extension activities to get students involved with the story/book/reading, and much more. The more I learn in all of my classes the more anxious I get about teaching and eventually having my own classroom. Another class that I have thoroughly enjoyed this semester is my Technology in the Classroom course. I learned so many new ways to incorporate technology into my lessons, as well as into the activities for my students. I learned how to better use technology that I was already familiar with. For example, I learned how to make a PowerPoint most effective for different grade levels. For younger levels that I would teach with my Early Childhood Education degree, it is important to use images more dominantly in my slides rather than text. Being that most of them will not be able to read much at all, it is most effective to use images on the slides.

Overall, this semester in it's entirety has gotten me extremely excited and given me a new outlook on teaching as a whole. I can't wait to graduate and to be able to motivate my students the way that my teachers have this semester.