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Week Fourteen

November 20, 2017

This will be a shorter blog post because of a short school week. Today was our only day of school. Four out of our twenty students were absent. The remaining sixteen students were pretty wound up. The only academic things that transpired today were the regular math class, plus a lot of catching up on incomplete assignments. There was no new instruction. Students had both P.E. and art in the morning, and then an assembly and an hour of fun activities in the afternoon. Sometimes it is easy to forget how young these students are. But there are some things that are always good reminders of their age. One of thing that always reminds me of their youngness is their complete inability to comprehend time when they are excited about something. Like last week when we did the activity in which they made landforms out of homemade dough, even though I told them numerous times we would do the activity after lunch, they asked me a million times that morning if it was time to do th

Week 13

November 17, 2017

I almost wrote this blog post last night and I am glad I did not because I had a very interesting day today. It was a day my students had been looking forward to all week. At the beginning of the week, we sent home a letter asking parents to make homemade salt dough to send to school on Friday for use in science. Today was the big day. At the end of the day, students were going to use the dough to create landforms on an island that they had colored. The students were excited all day. Even though I told the class several times that science would not be until 2pm, they asked all day long, “Is it dough time yet?!” After lunch and recess, we had one more activity to get through before students were allowed to start working on their islands. They had to use a text to answer one research question about Thanksgiving, using a graphic organizer. I thought they would be motivated to finish in a timely fashion so that they could start science, but the usual students still took a v

Week Twelve

November 10, 2017

Just when I feel like I really have the hang of things at school, something happens that makes me rethink. In ELA this week, my students have been learning about alphabetical order, dictionaries, and glossaries. My CT had one activity planned in which students looked up four words on www.dictionary.com to find pronunciation, part of speech, and a definition. I asked her if I could copy pages out of a children’s dictionary instead, and she agreed to let me try the activity that way. This was an eye-opening experience for me. Most of the children seemed baffled by the dictionary. I think that most of them had never used one before. The two students who didn’t struggle terribly with the activity worked at a much slower pace than I had anticipated. As I observed the class struggling to do the assignment, I wanted to kick myself. I should have anticipated that they would have had trouble with this. I stopped them all, and we looked up the first word together to model for

Week Eleven

November 02, 2017

First, thank God the edTPA is over. (The above picture is from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) Moving on, the thing I have been thinking about a lot this week is that what happens in the classroom with the students is a small percentage of what a teacher actually does. I knew this going into student teaching, but it has been more prominent in my thinking this week. I think it’s because the edTPA is over. Not only did the edTPA take up a lot of time, it was always in the back of my mind. It added another layer of stress to everything else. Now that it is over, I do feel like my load is lightened, but there is still so much to do. (I did ask my CT if I could have a heavier hand in planning now that I’m done with the edTPA, and she’s all for it.) I have just been thinking about all the behind-the-scenes work. I feel like no matter how much I work, there is always more to do. I could be looking for a better activity, creating a better worksheet, fi

Week Ten

October 26, 2017

This week I think I have improved in my teaching of ELA, though I’m not where I want to be yet. Looking at the week in ELA as a gradual release of responsibility to the students really helps. We "front load" the explicit and intentional teaching on Monday and Tuesday, with the students doing more independent work as the week goes on. In math and science the timing of the weeks is a little bit different. We are not typically starting with something new on Monday with the expectation of the students working on it independently by Friday. The students are still working toward mastery of the standard, but they do not necessarily follow a weekly trajectory like ELA. My CT paid me a compliment today. She said I do a good job teaching math and science and that she wants me to gain that same confidence when I teach ELA. I think part of the problems is that I have an affinity for teaching math and science because I enjoy the black-and-white nature of it. There is more gra

Week Nine

October 20, 2017

The last two weeks have been crazy. Last week was a short four-day week with early dismissal on Friday. Yesterday was early dismissal for the students, and then parent-teacher conferences until 9pm. Today was a teacher institute at the district. We have also had a complete overhaul of the way we do math. The change in math has been very interesting. Since the beginning of the year, five students from my class have been going to a math intervention program, which is taught by a special ed teacher. The school has recently been given the opportunity to extend this program to more struggling students. With more slots available for struggling students, an additional seven students from my class also qualify, bringing our total number of students in the math intervention to twelve of our twenty. Because so many of our students qualify for this intervention, my CT and I will each teach a small group using the math intervention in our classroom. Our students who are working at g

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